MORGAN: Another day, another mass burial hoax

A native band in British Columbia claims that radar has identified graves of murdered children. The CBC repeats the story from the band without question. The government lowers flags in apology. The band then shuts down communications and refuses to allow any further investigation into the alleged graves despite having taken millions in tax dollars to do that very thing. The story sounds familiar because this hoax is proving lucrative and the grifters won’t change a narrative that works.It's been over four years since a band in Kamloops band claimed they had discovered the remains of over 200 murdered children in a field next to a former Indian Residential School. The federal government allocated over $246 million to search for the bodies of children at former residential school sites. The Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc in Kamloops took $8 million of those funds and apparently didn’t find a thing. While they claim that they know the location of over 200 bodies, with $8 million to work with, they were still incapable of taking a shovel and digging even one of those alleged graves up. It’s a hoax, and the band knows it’s a hoax. If they really believed children’s bodies were interred there, a forensic excavation would have begun within weeks of the discovery of anomalies. The government is willing to give them millions without oversight though so why would they stop asking? They are asking for more by the way.The claim made in Sechelt, British Columbia, is that radar has identified the graves of 81 children. When the Kamloops hoax was announced, it made international headlines. The response to the latest hoax has been more muted. Only a few outlets have given it any coverage. The Sechelt one didn’t make many waves, though the CBC dutifully called the radar anomalies unmarked graves. After a backlash over the inaccurate and inflammatory reporting, CBC reporter Alanna Kelly deleted the posting where she said graves have been found and locked down her account on X. People are getting sick and tired of being fed this hoax.Another grift being carried out by many indigenous bands is to do GPR surveys over known cemeteries and then acting aghast when indications of graves are found. That was done in Grouard, Alberta, in 2022, and it was reported as a possible mass grave site. The news faded away when it became clear that all they had done was prove that a cemetery contained bodies. How much funding they got to establish this is unknown. Most burials on native reserves, historically and even today, are only marked with wooden crosses which deteriorate after a few years. It is common for cemeteries to have large sections of unmarked graves. It doesn’t mean the bodies were surreptitiously buried there or that there was foul play. It makes for good news copy when these sites are “discovered,” though.The reluctance to dig on these sites proves the motivations of the activists to be fraudulent rather than genuine. In Winnipeg, activists lobbied to have tens of millions dedicated to digging into a local landfill to find the bodies of two murdered women suspected to be there. It was claimed that burial is sacred and these bodies must be found and properly interred at any cost.Why then aren’t the alleged bodies at the residential schools considered sacred?Why hasn’t it become a priority to return these remains to the families?That exposes another part of the hoax. While it is alleged that hundreds of children were killed and buried at these residential school sites, there aren’t any families to be found making the claims that children disappeared. One would think at least a few would be demanding to know where their children went. The schools also kept meticulous records of the students. They needed to do so to be reimbursed by the government. There are no records of vanishing children to be found. Where did these alleged children come from?At a church site in Manitoba and at a hospital site in Edmonton, activists made the error of actually excavating the alleged graves identified by the radar. In both cases, not a single body was found despite oral history claiming burials there. Since those failures, indigenous bands have learned not to excavate. They just do radar surveys and demand money.Speaking of oral history, the claims made by attendees of the Kamloops residential school are that they were forced to go out and dig graves in the night for their murdered classmates as recently as the 1960s. If this is true, it is possible the perpetrators may even still be alive to be prosecuted. If the RCMP believed any of this, there would be excavations. Mass murders don’t just remain uninvestigated. They know there are no bodies to be found.The child burial hoaxes at residential school sites have caused hurt and social division. Over a hundred churches have been vandalized or burned to the ground in response, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted. This will only continue as long as the hoaxes are indulged rather than called out. It’s time to take the shovels out and prove what’s underground at these sites once and for all no matter what the local band thinks. Indigenous bands have no authority to block murder investigations and they're not sovereign nations despite what some may claim. That’s a hoax for another column though. In the meantime, let’s get digging.