The Saga Of Canada's Contentious Unmarked Graves Continues

Response To Quillette Podcast with Terry Glavin & Jonathan Kay

Photo by the blowup on Unsplash

On July 25th I published a response to Jonathan Kay’s Quillette piece discussing the media's failure to report objectively on the unmarked graves story; a topic I’ve written about here, here, and here - and also on this Substack as well as my own Substack The Turn. In my response, I delineated the unmarked graves narrative into two stages:

1) The pre-Glavin Consensus Stage, when media, politicians and much of the public where united in unquestioning acceptance of sensationalist claims of clandestine burials of murdered former indigenous students at Indian Residential School (IRS).

2) The post-Glavin Confusion Stage, which began when the National Post published veteran Canadian journalist Terry Glavin’s excellent Year Of The Graves exposé that detailed the multiple ways the media got it wrong. Like, really wrong! From this point on things have become interesting as truth has stubbornly poked its head out here and there, only to be pushed back down by activists masquerading as academics or journalists, charging anyone who deviates from the status quo as a denialist.

For many Canadians, Terry’s National Post essay was the first time they learned that claims involving the remains of 215 indigenous children had not been substantiated. No actual remains of children had been unearthed in the year that passed since the story initially broke in Kamloops, B.C. A few Canadians may have even noticed a new term denialist being cast at anyone who questioned why? Or wondered why an RCMP investigation into suspected unmarked graves in Kamloops, and excavations performed to verify the ground penetrating radar readings that started the whole debacle, were never initiated.

Today, I am responding to Jonathan Kay’s interview with Terry Glavin which was posted to Quillette on Aug 3rd. This was a great discussion and a breath of fresh air. I highly recommend that you stop reading this immediately and go listen to their 42-minute talk. I’ll wait...

Alright, let’s get into it. Below, I highlight six areas Terry and Jonathan discuss and, in some cases offer additional sources and commentary I hope will contribute to the discourse. The six areas are 1) The Oblates of Mary Immaculate 2) Terry’s claim that cultural genocide was a federal project 3) Chief Casimir (and other indigenous leaders who were not discussed) 4) Terry’s comments about intergenerational trauma 5) The mortality rate from disease at IRS 6) The rebranding of Canada as an oppressive white supremacist colonial state.

1). The Oblates of Mary of Immaculate.

According to Terry, over half of all IRSs were run by Catholic groups, with the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in charge of the majority. Their goal was not to kill the Indian in the child, it was the opposite. They had intended to protect the indigenous from the “corrupting influences of bourgeois culture,” while at the same time giving them an education that would assist their survival in a modern world.

Terry also provides a summary of their background. Emerging from the Great Terror of France, they ended up in the United States where they were driven North after being accused of siding with the indigenous. Once in Canada, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate were charged with the operations of many IRS.

2) Cultural Genocide

Terry’s argument is that it was not the policy of the Oblates of Marry Immaculate or of the Catholic Church to harm the indigenous or commit “cultural genocide.”  However, according to Terry, the federal project was cultural genocide. To prevent the indigenous from going extinct, it was necessary to “turn them into white people.”

In an email exchange researcher Nina Green had this to say: “Assimilation and/or turning the Indian into a white man wasn’t anybody’s objective at the time, whether it was the Oblates, or the federal government.  It’s a modern myth.”

Here is a section from Nina’s Dorchester Review piece, Two Thirds Did Not Attend:

In fact, the Canadian government made clear at the time that the purpose of educating status Indian children in residential schools was “to develop the great natural intelligence of the race and to fit the Indian for civilized life in his own environment”:

It was never the policy, nor the end and aim of the endeavour to transform an Indian into a white man. Speaking in the widest terms, the provision of education for the Indian is the attempt to develop the great natural intelligence of the race and to fit the Indian for civilized life in his own environment. It include [sic] not only a scholastic education, but instruction in the means of gaining a livelihood from the soil or as a member of an industrial or mercantile community, and the substitution of Christian ideals of conduct and morals for aboriginal concepts of both.[1]

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[1] Department of Indian Affairs Annual Report, 1910, p. 435, at https://recherche-collection-search.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/home/record?app=indaffannrep&IdNumber=22322

That was in 1910.

1905 Iaar Raai

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Also, from Nina - “In the DIA Annual Report for 1905 (copy attached above) we find the DIA stating that once students graduated from industrial schools, the Department didn’t want to try to find them jobs in cities and towns because the white culture was too corrupting an influence on them”:

I have discouraged the employment of our ex-pupils in cities and towns, where they are more exposed to intoxicating liquor and other temptations than on the reserves. On their own reserves they possess free land, are exempt from taxes, and where the soil is good, as is the case on most of the prairie reserves, they should easily make an independent living.

3) The Claims of Chief Casmir and other Indigenous Leaders

The official press release by the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc in Kamloops, B.C. on May 27th of 2021 in the wake of the initial discovery of the ground-penetrating radar detected soil disturbances makes clear the claims of Chief Casimir.

“It is with a heavy heart that Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc 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 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.”

Terry is correct in focusing on the media for getting the unmarked graves story so horribly wrong. However, Jonathan challenges him a little by pointing out just how false the above press release was. Here Jonathan shows his wisdom and objectivity - and extends Chief Casimir no small order of generosity of spirit. Jonathan is not angry that Chief Casimir believes something that most likely is false; he is upset that the media believed her unquestioningly. Understanding that Chief Casimir is perhaps too close and emotionally entangled to be objective, Jonathan says, “Lots of people make speculative claims, it’s the job of journalists to fact check it.”

This is the same wisdom and generosity of spirit extended to indigenous leaders that Terry has also demonstrated. I admire both men greatly for possessing this honorable quality of character. However, I also cannot fault researchers who are focused on truth, who both criticize and implicate some indigenous leaders for their role in the dissemination of falsehoods devastating to the impression of Canada many previously had held.

I’m not sure if either Jonathan or Terry are aware of an Assembly of First Nations resolution moved by Chief Casimir six months after the initial announcement of unmarked graves in Kamloops (seconded by Chief Judy Wilson of the Neskonlith Band). Below is a relevant section:

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Chiefs-in-Assembly:

1. Stand in solidarity with the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc and all survivors of the Residential School System and their families and assert that the mass grave discovered at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School reveals Crown conduct reflecting a pattern of genocide against Indigenous Peoples that must be thoroughly examined and considered in terms of Canada’s potential breaches of international humanitarian and human rights law. (italics added)

Here the AFN echoes the false claims of mass graves previously made by mainstream media, like the New York Times, and claims that “Crown conduct reflecting a pattern of genocide against Indigenous Peoples” occurred at former Indian Residential Schools.

In an email exchange with Brian Giesbrecht, he mentioned that - “even Sarah Beaulieu (GPR specialist who located the 215 ‘unmarked graves’ in Kamloops) repeated the ‘6 year old gravedigger’ myth in a way that indicated she believed it” - and that - “neither Glavin nor Kay mentioned Chief Willie Sellars’ claims. Those claims are over the top, and even more extreme than the Kamloops claim.”

Chief Willie Sellars is chief of the Williams Lake First Nation, where a St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School Investigation revealed 93 potential graves.  Here is an example of what Brian is talking about:

“This journey has led our investigation team into the darkest recesses of human behaviour. Our team has recorded not only stories involving the murder and disappearance of children and infants, they have listened to countless stories of systematic torture, starvation, rape and sexual assault of children at St. Joseph’s Mission.” - Chief Willie Sellars

In the same article, Chief Sellars goes on to describe “children being beaten until they lost consciousness, forcible confinement to the wall of the barn, intentional starvation and exposure,”  gang-rape, priests burning the unwanted babies of their rape victims in incinerators, and where “bodies were cast into the river, left at the bottom of lakes, tossed like garbage into incinerators.”

So yes, the media got it wrong. And Jonathan Kay is right in blaming the media for accepting without question sensational claims of indigenous leaders and advocates.

4)  Intergenerational trauma - Terry says something like - If you take these kids away from their parents and community and then bring them back, they don’t know what parenting is. Jonathan agrees and says that we take for granted that people know what parenting is.  My response is that this line of thinking does not fully appreciate the child neglect on reserves, and the fact that in practice in the latter years of the residential school system, most children enrolled were there for child welfare reasons.

In other words, children of abusive or neglectful parents do not learn anything but negative unhealthy behavior. In these cases, it is not fair to say that the IRSs broke families apart, when the truth is, many families were already broken, and the IRSs were an attempt to deal with that sad fact.

5) The Mortality Rate at IRS

Terry responded affirmatively to the claim that mortality rates from diseases like tuberculosis were higher at Indian Residential Schools. But higher than what? The general population at the time? Or the on-reserve population?

It is well established that in the years before vaccines and antibiotics, diseases unintentionally brought by European settlers were particularly unkind to the indigenous peoples, who did not have the natural immunity needed to protect against them.

From an email from historian Jacques Rouillard, in reference to the Truth and Reconciliation Report -

“The 1906 annual report of Dr. Peter Bryce, the chief medical officer for Indian Affairs, observed that “the Indian population of Canada has a mortality rate of more than double that of the whole population, and in some provinces more than three times.” Tuberculosis was the prevalent cause of death. He described a cycle of disease in which infants and children were infected at home and sent to residential schools, where they infected other children. The children infected in the schools were “sent home when too ill to remain at school, or because of being a danger to the other scholars, and have conveyed the disease to houses previously free.”

The following year, Bryce published a damning report on the conditions at prairie boarding schools. In an age when fresh air was seen as being central to the successful treatment of tuberculosis, he concluded that, with only a few exceptions, the ventilation at the schools was “extremely inadequate.” - Summary of the TRC Final Report, p. 95-96

All of this can lead people to reach a number of conclusions about IRSs and the proliferation of disease throughout the indigenous community. The first being that children were forced into the cramped quarters of poorly ventilated IRSs where they contracted tuberculosis. However, there is an accumulating body of material evidence to suggest that in just as many, if not a greater number of cases, the more cramped poorly ventilated and over-populated quarters were on the reserves, and most kids enrolled in IRSs were already showing the initial signs of tuberculosis (a determination made by Bryce himself).

Another point that is rarely ever mentioned, is that whether a child was sick before enrollment in an IRS or not, matters little in cases of on-reserve abuse or neglect, in which the child was apprehended as a function of child welfare, and placed in an IRS as a last resort. Much of the policy throughout the history of IRS involved specific instructions that placement in IRSs be reserved for orphaned, abused or neglected indigenous children. In many desperate cases, sick or not sick, the IRS was the best place for the child to be. This is a fact that attests to the harshness of the times and the challenges faced by indigenous Canadians and the members of the clergy that tried to run a grossly underfunded school system. As harsh and challenging as those times were, there was nothing systemically evil about what either the Canadian government or the Catholic church did in their attempts to help the indigenous.

In another email exchange, this time with Canadian historian Ian James Gentles, regarding the mortality rates from disease at IRS and the controversial Bryce reports, Ian had this to say:

“As for the vexed issue of disease and mortality people are understandably confused and misled by the contradictory statements by Dr Peter Bryce at different dates. In 1907, while conceding that the Indian Schools had many things going for them, he indicted them as agents for the spread of TB, and the high mortality among children.

In 1909 with his colleague Dr. J.D. Lafferty, he carried out examinations at native schools in the Calgary area. They found that TB was present in all the children they examined.  No child awaiting admission to school was found to be free from TB, from which they concluded “that the primary source of infection is in the home”. They further reported that the group at greatest risk was infants under the age of one. Since these infants could not have attended any school, the finding strongly suggested that the source of TB was indeed primarily in the home, and not in the school.”

6) Rebranding Canada as Awful

Terry and Jonathan discussed their ideas around why the media and politicians went along so willingly with a total re-draft of the history of Canada - a country, they point out, where 10 years ago its citizens were proud of the fact it was considered a beacon of hope to countless numbers all over the globe who dreamt of a better life.

There are many more who deserve pointing out, but Terry and Jonathan implicate the right political actors, focusing on Minister of Crown–Indigenous Relations, Marc Miller, who called Canadian historian Jacques Rouillard a denialist for mentioning that no remains had yet to be uncovered months after the much-hyped discovery of unmarked graves in Kamloops, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who took a knee and posed for a picture with a teddy bear at the foot of an unmarked grave he knew very well was part of a former Catholic community cemetery.

Terry described Trudeau’s leadership as a “social media marketing strategy in charge of a G7 nation.” The now infamous teddy bear photo-op provides no better example of the narcissistic depths to which Trudeau will sink for likes and retweets. It is unfortunate that the entire historical legacy of a once-thought great nation had to be so thoroughly desecrated for Trudeau to expedite his self-serving political ends.

I have a general sense that Jonathan and Terry would agree that Trudeau’s acceptance of, and role played, in the unmarked graves narrative and the rebranding of Canada as awful, has everything to do with getting the Liberals re-elected, and absolutely nothing to do with Truth and Reconciliation.

Near the end of the podcast, after having told Jonathan that he personally knows of indigenous people who were abused at IRS, Terry makes the observation that around ten years ago it was normal for indigenous people with differing IRS experiences to respect each other's differing experiences. Terry explains that a former IRS student who had a positive experience could have coffee and get along with a former IRS student who had been abused. But something changed, and that is no longer the case.

A focus on how totalitarian identity politics has manifested in the West may provide the best answer why this is. Especially the post-George Floyd years, where the shallowness and condescension present in this ugly woke movement masquerades as liberation. In a relevant email exchange, Canadian anthropologist Hymie Rubenstein had this to say about the media’s failure to challenge the claims of activists (especially when concerning so-called oppressed identity groups):

“Yes, it is frigging racist because the media keep holding indigenous leaders and their people to a much lower standard of truth telling and accountability than any other category of Canadians because of their soft bigotry of low expectations when it comes to anything indigenous.”

Canadians should be furious with the media. It’s beyond weird that so many members of both the media and public had seemed primed for the unmarked graves story, and even seemed to take a perverse pleasure in some of the more gruesome and sensational falsehoods. It is a bizarre blend of oikophobia and luxury beliefs that I’m sure social scientists will study for centuries to come. But today’s piece, and the podcast that was my subject, are about pointing the finger at the constituency who holds the greatest amount of responsibility for the proliferation of falsehoods that so damaged our national reputation: the media.

On that note, I will end today's column with the closing thought on the Quillette podcast - “It’s kind of embarrassing to be a journalist right now”- Terry Glavin.