Tanya Talaga has let the cat out of the bag

How were Canadians duped?

Children’s shoes and toys were placed in front of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia after the remains of 215 children, some as young as 3, were found at the site this past week.Credit...Dennis Owen/Reuters

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By Nina Green

We already had partial answers.

We already knew from Hansard that Marc Miller, then Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, had a heads up and was in contact with Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Kamloops Band before the Band released its false claim at 4:01 p.m. on 27 May 2021 via a tweet from James Peters of CFJC Today that it had found 'the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School'.

It also appears from Hansard that Gary Anandasangaree, now the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and then Marc Miller's Parliamentary Secretary, also had a heads up before the false Kamloops claim was made public.  Anandasangaree fielded most of the questions from Members of Parliament on 31 May 2021.

We know from the statement by then Kamloops Mayor Ken Christian that the Kamloops City Council had a heads up before the Kamloops Band's false claim was released to the media.

Given that the federal government and the Kamloops City Council were alerted in advance, it appears almost certain the BC government and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs also had a heads up before the Kamloops Band's false claim went public.

Did Bishop William McGrattan of Calgary and other members of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops also have a heads up?  That important question remains unanswered.  Hopefully Bishop McGrattan will break his silence and answer it.

Did select Canadian journalists also get a heads up?

Tanya Talaga's just-released book, The Knowing, answers that question in the affirmative.  She tells us that she was one of a select group of journalists who were given a heads up and an embargoed copy of the Kamloops Band's media release by Racelle Kooy two days prior to the Kamloops Band's announcement of its false claim.  Until now, Canadians had understood that only James Peters, who had been given a 'scoop' by the Kamloops Band, had known in advance of the Kamloops Band's false claim.  Now it appears that an unknown number of select journalists who could be trusted to handle the story with 'sensitivity' were given an embargoed copy of the press release two days in advance while other journalists, and the Canadian public, were deliberately kept in the dark.

Here how Tanya Talaga tells the story in Chapter Two of The Knowing:

I had missed the email from Racelle Kooy, who was the acting media relations coordinator for Tk'emlups te Secwepemc, a First Nation in the southern British Columbia Interior that is also home to the Kamloops Indian Residential School, the largest school of its kind in Canada.  She had sent it two days earlier.  "Crap,"I thought.  "Here she was offering me an exclusive and I, typically, neglected to read my email."  Exclusives, in the news business, are a rarity, and every journalist strives to get them, to be first with the news before everyone else.

I did not know Kooy, but I knew of her.  In 2019, she ran in the federal election for the Green Party in Victoria.  Kooy is well known in the Indigenous media world as a sharpshooter, one who often works as a moderator for Assembly of First Nations events - which means trying to keep more than six hundred Chiefs in line and keep meetings running like clockwork.  Kooy is someone who doesn't suffer fools.  If she sends an email offering an exclusive, you respond.

Her message began: "Weytk Tanya, I am honoured to be working with Tk'emlups to Secwepemc to bring forward some tragic news that was a 'knowing' before but is now confirmed."

Kooy said they were sending out an embargoed press release to select journalists who they felt could bring the devastating news to light with sensitivity.

The release categorized the unthinkable.  It began to say that with a "heavy heart" Tk'emlups te Secwepemc Kukpi7 (Chief) Rosanne Casimir confirmed what survivors of the Kamloops Indian Residential School knew: that there were children buried on the former school ground.  It further said that ground-penetrating radar used over the past weekend had indicated the "confirmation of the remains of 215 children" who were students of Kamloops.

I could not believe what I was reading.  The magnitude of Kooy's words was hard to comprehend and process.  The release went on to say that the Tk'emlups leadership acknowledged their responsibility to care for these lost children.

Sick to my stomach, I dialed Racelle's cell.  She picked up instantly.  She sounded like she was in the middle of chaos.  I wasn't sure if she could hear me.  I got to the point.  I apologized for not reading her email two days earlier.  I told her I wanted to write the story and that I was flying to Kamloops.  The words came out of my mouth before I even understood them myself.

She yelled into the phone, "How soon can you get here?"

This was one of those moments.  I booked my flight and then sent a note to David Walmsley, the Globe and Mail's editor, and Natasha Hassan, the Opinion editor and my direct boss, to let them know I was heading to Kamloops and why.  By then, the story was breaking across social media.  As I got on a plane to Kelowna, they put me in touch with investigations editor Renata D'Aliesio.

The drive from the Kelowna airport to the city of Kamloops isn't long - two hours, but it is breathtaking . . . .

During her first few days in Kamloops Talaga says Racelle Kooy was fielding calls from media all over the world and telling people to stay away.  Talaga's account in Chapter Two continues:

There would be no media at this time, except those select few who, like me, were invited.  How could there be?

As a Globe columnist, I was also fielding questions, but they were coming from the Globe's Parliament Hill bureau.  On one of my first nights there, my editor called me.  It was late, and I was in my hotel room, exhausted.  She apologized for what she was about to ask me and then she said, "The Prime Minister's Office, the RCMP, is questioning the numbers - the 215."  There was more.  "There is talk that there is internal strife in the community."

As an Anishinaabe journalist my back went up.  As a political reporter, I had seen this before.  Calls from the centre of power, the PMO, those who run the highest office in the land in Canada, to reporters in a political bureau, questioning where the truth lies, poking what they're hearing, looking for off-the-record information in exchange for sharing a bit of their own.

When Canadian political leadership behaves this way, it shows its true colours and perpetuates the unfortunate biases that have plagued Indigenous-Canadian relations and reporting since the time of Sir John A. Macdonald: a lack of trust, a downplaying of what Indigenous Peoples have experienced or discovered.  Then, to top it off, the old "There is division in the community," an age-old divide-and-conquer tactic seen at the negotiation table and in the practices of the press.  It is the same old trope.

I told my editor that what she heard was categorically not true.  The number was correct.  And furthermore, that I had not seen any division.  In fact, I'd seen the exact opposite: unity.  She said she'd tell everyone what I'd said, and she apologized for having to be the messenger.  We hung up.

My head was spinning, but I had one clear thought: we needed Murray Sinclair.  Tk'emlups needed Murray, former senator and the former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, or TRC.  He was my next call.

When I reached him, I told him what was occurring, what I was seeing.  He said, "You are in the eye of the storm now.  Be careful."

There's obviously a lot omitted from Talaga's account of her phone call to Murray Sinclair.  After hearing that the Prime Minister's Office and the RCMP were questioning the Kamloops Band's false claim, she concluded that the situation was desperate, and that intervention by Murray Sinclair was the only solution, yet she tells us the call produced nothing more than a comment from Sinclair that she should 'be careful' because she was 'in the eye of the storm'?

Obviously that's not the whole story, but fortunately we do know from Hansard what Murray Sinclair actually did after receiving Tanya Talaga's early morning call from Kamloops.  Murray Sinclair castigated the RCMP investigation (run by Indigenous RCMP Superintendent, Sydney Lecky) to a Parliamentary Committee on 3 June 2021: 

I understand that in British Columbia.... I got a call early this morning, in fact, saying that the RCMP have now declared that a major investigation is going to occur into the bodies that have been located in Kamloops, and they are now beginning to question those who have made this story available. Unfortunately, in the typical, heavy-handed and ham-handed police way, they are simply intimidating people, rather than helping them. We need to have a discussion with the police about how they're handling it, because they should not be pursuing those who are revealing the information. They should, in fact, be looking at and looking for those records. They should be looking at what we know as opposed to trying to pursue witnesses.

The young lady who did the research on the ground-penetrating radar, for example, is quite scared of the approach that the RCMP have taken with her, and I don't blame her. My advice to her—and others—has been to make sure she has legal counsel available to her so that she is not mistreated going forward.

According to news reports, as a result of Sinclair's intervention the RCMP investigation was turned over to the Kamloops Band.  Predictably, the Kamloops Band's 'investigation' has produced zero results in the past three years.

Moreover we now know that Tanya Talaga was completely wrong when she told her Globe and Mail editor that the Prime Minister's Office and the RCMP should not be questioning the GPR results.  The PMO and the RCMP were rightly suspicious of the claim that ’the remains of 215 children had been found'.  However Talaga says she told her editor that what the PMO and RCMP were saying was 'categorically not true.  The number was correct.' 

What Tanya Talaga should have told her editor is that the Kamloops Band's claim to have found 'the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School' was categorically false.  Tanya Talaga had seen no remains at Kamloops.  No remains had been found at the time, and none have been found to date.  All that Dr Sarah Beaulieu found using ground penetrating radar (GPR) was 15 shovel test pits from an archaeological excavation conducted by Simon Fraser University in conjunction with the Kamloops Band in the early 2000s, and the remains of the 2000 linear feet of septic field trenches installed in 1924 to dispose of the school's sewage, none of which Dr Beaulieu knew about because she had failed to do the necessary preliminary historical research.

Where do Canadians go from here?

Canadians need to find out why the Kamloops Band told qualified journalists from across Canada and around the world to stay away, and deliberately permitted only a preselected few journalists to have access to information.  Thus, the first step is for the names of all the select journalists who received the embargoed Kamloops Band's media release two days in advance to be made public so that Canadians know which journalists, in addition to Tanya Talaga, were considered sufficiently trusted by Racelle Kooy to handle the story with 'sensitivity', i.e. not ask any hard questions.  

The second step is for the federal government and Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew to stop funding the University of Manitoba until it takes the false and misleading list of thousands of so-called 'missing' residential school children down from its NCTR website.  That list has traumatized and misled Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians, and the world, for far too long.  Kimberly Murray told the Canadian Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples on 21 March 2023 that 'the children aren't missing', which is the plain unvarnished truth.  There are no missing Indian residential school children, and for the University of Manitoba to pretend otherwise is unconscionable.

Only when the University of Manitoba removes that specious list from its NCTR website can Canada begin to move forward.

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Thanks for reading. For more from Nina Green, read The truth about Orange Shirt Day Also checkout Nina’s website Indian Residential School Records

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