The claim thousands of Indian Residential School students are buried in 'mass graves' across Canada is slowly but surely being exposed as a hoax. This should not be unexpected given its lack of supporting physical evidence..Widespread promotion of this deception began on May 27, 2021 with the claim of students secretly buried in an abandoned apple orchard beside the long-abandoned Kamloops, BC, Indian Residential School..According to Kamloops Indian Reserve Chief Rosanne Casimir, “… 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…. At this time, we have more questions than answers. We look forward to providing updates as they become available.”.There has never been any such confirmation, no substantial updates have ever been provided and there are still more questions than answers..Although the dam has not yet burst on this burial ruse, it was badly damaged on August 18, 2023. That was when the 14 closely spaced soil disturbances detected last year using GPR in the basement of the church on the site of the former Pine Creek Residential School turned out to contain no human remains..From now on, any more findings of buried bodies using GPR, a technique that can’t detect organic remains and is most useful in detecting graves in known cemeteries, will be treated with the skepticism, if not cynicism, they deserve..As the result of fearless reporting by a handful of curious researchers, it has become increasingly clear the Kamloops claim, and the many copycat claims like it that followed, are fallacious. More commentators and the reading public are awaking to the mass grave fake propaganda, even though the Canadian mainstream media has barely responded to the discovery of presumptive graves containing no human remains.. Orwell quote .Recall that Canada was rocked to its core following the Kamloops announcement by lurid tales of residential school students brutally murdered and secretly buried in 'mass graves' across the country. Stories of children’s bodies hanging from meat hooks in barns, babies being thrown into furnaces, and priests clubbing children to death and throwing them into pits or off balconies are just some of the fabulations still making their rounds in indigenous communities..Despite the absence of credible evidence supporting any of these fables, the federal government earmarked $320 million to indigenous communities to search for children never recorded missing at the time of their deaths. A genocide motion passed in Parliament last year was based on these false stories and a $60 million building is being constructed at the University of Manitoba to commemorate a 'genocide' that never happened..But where did these frightening genocide tales come from and how were they propagated?.The fundamental principle was first articulated by one of history’s most successful propagandists, Joseph Goebbels, who wrote, “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over” and “I'm looking for the teacher who is simple enough to be great, and great enough to be simple.” And whether the source is acknowledged or not, it has been successfully used ever since, for the simple reason that it works..Though he is no genocidal Nazi, Kevin Annett, a defrocked United Church priest, has been a simple and constant propagandist from the early 1990s to the present, making it his life’s work to convince as many people as possible that tens of thousands of Indian Residential School children were brutally murdered by priests in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, by repeating this ad nauseam.. Chomsky .He has done so by giving countless addresses, producing many videos, and publishing several books, his only vocations since being expelled from the United Church in 1995, five years after his ordination, for outrageous rants from the pulpit. For his valiant efforts, Annett claims that esteemed linguist and political scientist Noam Chomsky in 2002 wrote, “Kevin Annett is more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than many who have received it in the past. What has been done to him is outrageous.”.In totalitarian regimes, influential propagandists operate by using the media to vilify their opponents and political power to effect their marginalization or dismissal from public positions, eerily similar to what happened to academics such as Frances Widdowson and Jim McMurtry for questioning prevailing myths about Canada’s Indian Residential Schools in our so-called bastion of free speech and open debate..Propagandists also try to ensure that viewpoints contrary to the establishment view are censored or eliminated from all media, especially the public press. These efforts are now taking place in Canada’s legacy media self-censorship on indigenous issues paralleled by ongoing proposals to prosecute indigenous “genocide denialism” as a hate crime.. Rev. Kevin D. AnnettRev. Kevin D. Annett .As for Kevin Annett’s role in this destruction, like many conspiracy theorists, he didn’t fabricate all or even most of his lurid tales. Instead, his core canards about murdering priests and kidnapping by Queen Elizabeth II came from tall tales told to him by homeless alcoholics like “Billie” Coombes, a former Kamloops Indians Residential School student Annett befriended in Vancouver’s skid row..But, as can be observed by watching videos such as Unrepentant: Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide where Coombes is interviewed, a documentary viewed by thousands of people, he relates childish ghost stories that only the most unsophisticated viewer could believe. Respected investigative journalist, Terry Glavin, undeterred by such rants, did a thorough exposé of Annett’s work in 2008. Others such as Frances Widdowson have written about this charlatan since then..The Mohawk community in Brantford hired Annett in 2012, based on his growing fame, but he was exposed as a fraud and expelled from the reserve when he was found trying to pass off chicken bones as the remains of young indigenous children. Exactly how much damage Annett has already done, and how much he will eventually cost Canadians is unclear. The $320 million the federal government has committed to searching for Annett’s phantom children is just the tip of what is a very deep and dangerous iceberg..Much of this damage involves indigenous organizations and communities continually repeating his myths about mass graves and other atrocities across Canada, proof of the power of repetitive propaganda..More particularly, the current use of the expression 'mass grave,' while originating with Annett and his informants, has been employed of late entirely by indigenous leaders, associations, and media sites such as the Saddle Lake Cree Indian Reserve, the Kamloops Indian Reserve which hypocritically reversed its original announcement, the Windspeaker.com online indigenous newsletter, the statement from Southern Chiefs’ Organization, representing 34 Anishinaabe and Dakota Nations, the Final Resolution of Union of British Columbian Chiefs, representing more than 150 of the province’s Indian Bands, the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations, representing and advocating for the 203 First Nations in British Columbia, and Murray Sinclair, former Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.. Dr. Francis WiddowsonThe lawsuit said UofL disregarded free expression and its own mission by cancelling Dr. Francis Widdowson's February 2023 event. .The mainstream media was just parroting what indigenous organizations and leaders were saying, contrary to the questionable exoneration of aboriginal culpability by Terry Glavin, Tristin Hopper and Meaghan Walker-Williams..Walker-Williams, a Cowichan Tribes member, even argued “if there were reports of mass graves by some members of First Nations communities, it was largely because they likely did not understand what a ‘mass grave’ meant.”.This false, even racist, assertion that indigenous leaders and activists, including Murray Sinclair, are too ignorant to know the difference between individual and collective burials is beyond the pale..Despite massive indigenous liability for spreading the mass grave hoax, it took a person of Annett’s guile, grit and megalomania to make these stories seem believable to entire indigenous communities and to many otherwise so-called sensible people..As for the federal government, it’s so hyper-committed to promoting the genocide canard the only possible response is outlawing indigenous “genocide denialism,” an uphill constitutional battle if there ever was one, but one closely resembling totalitarian silencing and punishment..What can be said with some certainty at this uncertain point is that Kevin Annett has singlehandedly inflicted damage on this country that may take decades to undo..Brian Giesbrecht is a retired Manitoba provincial court judge, senior fellow with the Frontier Center for Public Policy, and frequent commentator on public policy issues..Hymie Rubenstein is editor of REAL Indigenous Report. He is also a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba.
