As this year draws to a close, it is possible to present closure to a key part of a story that rocked Canada to its core mid-way through the year before last, namely the May 2021 alleged discovery of the buried remains of 215 indigenous children beside the former Indian Residential School on the Kamloops Indian Reserve.There is no doubt Terry Glavin helped rehabilitate Canada’s tarnished reputation as a genocidal country when he wrote an article for the National Post on May 26, 2022 titled The Year of the Graves: How the World’s Media Got it Wrong on Residential School Graves challenging critical aspects of this gruesome discovery that are also relevant to the many others that followed, including the last one announced at the end of September this year.Glavin’s article brought a much better understanding of the role the legacy media played in telling the story of mass burials, unmarked graves, missing children and even genocide at this former boarding school and others like it across the country. This role involved writing the most sensational headlines possible and mindlessly repeating the inflammatory but undocumented rhetoric claiming the reputed secret internment of unnamed Indian Residential School children, the result of the actions of wicked, even murderous, people.These stories are still firmly planted today, especially in indigenous minds, but given Glavin’s efforts, more people are beginning to question them. For this, all Canadians should be grateful.That said, Glavin and others reserved their critique of the mass graves and genocide myths for the media alone, ignoring the central role of indigenous leadership in the process.Glavin’s 2022 essay shows he was aware of the May 27 2021 media release from the Kamloops band that stated: “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.”He must have known “confirmation of the remains of 215 children” were not the words of the legacy media; they were the words of Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Rosanne Casimir. Given Glavin’s awareness of this announcement, how can he blame only the media for the hysteria, division, and destruction — the shaming, blaming, and church burning — which were fomented by a “stark truth” that still has no proof 2.5 years later? And what intent could Chief Casimir have had by uttering these empty words except to ignite a predictable media firestorm and hate fest across Canada and around the world?The profound hurt the frenzied aftermath of the announcement has had on ordinary indigenous peoples across the country began somewhere. That somewhere was Kamloops in 2021.As well as asking why Glavin ignored the substance and intent of this media release from the Kamloops Indian Reserve, we also need to ask why the band has consistently refused to answer simple questions about its so-called discovery of the bodies of missing children or why it continues to reject excavation of the former apple orchard where children were alleged to have been buried. If the band believes these children were murdered, why has its leadership denied involvement of the RCMP in carrying out a thorough forensic investigation?As for Glavin, was he unaware of the June 1 2021 headline in the Toronto Star, Canada’s most widely-read newspaper, regarding the following comments from Murray Sinclair, chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: “Survivors talked about children who suddenly went missing. Some talked about children who went missing into mass burial sites.”Did he also not know about the Globe and Mail’s June 1, 2021 declaration that “Mr. Sinclair said his commission heard from survivors who talked about children being ‘buried in large numbers into mass burial sites.’”A few days after the Kamloops story broke, the same Murray Sinclair told CBC’s The Current radio program that 15,000 to 25,000 indigenous children could have died as a result of their residential school experiences. Did Glavin not know about that assertion, for which there is still no evidence?To be fair, Glavin might not have known about a June 4 2021 statement issued by the Southern Chiefs’ Organization representing 34 Manitoba First Nations that stated, “The unsurprising discovery of 215 precious children buried in a mass grave at the Kamloops residential school site is absolute and further proof of the genocide and crimes against humanity that Canada committed, kept silent on and tried to cover up for generations.”Had he been aware of the many similar assertions, he may have been constrained from writing, “From the beginning, the local indigenous leaders tended to argue for careful, thoughtful and precise language. It was Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Rosanne Casimir who pointed out, after the first shocking headlines: ‘This is not a mass grave, but rather unmarked burial sites that are, to our knowledge, also undocumented.’”Glavin is one of Canada’s premier research journalists and his long National Post piece paid particular attention to the Kamloops revelations. How could it have escaped his attention that on July 6 2021, a little more than a month after the Kamloops announcement, Chief Casimir sponsored a quickly passed resolution at an annual assembly of Assembly of First Nations, an influential national organization representing 640 indigenous communities, using the expression “mass graves” or “mass burial sites” no fewer than five times?Was Glavin also unaware that former Assembly of First Nations National Chief RoseAnne Archibald told the BBC’s Hardtalk program in June 2021 that 1,600 or more murdered indigenous children’s bodies had been recovered “so far,” even though no indigenous children’s bodies had been recovered then, nor have there been bodies recovered since?According to Glavin, “From the beginning, the local indigenous leaders have tended to argue for careful, thoughtful and precise language.”This is false: there have been hundreds of mainstream and alternative media stories directly quoting outrageous and unverified allegations made by local, regional and national chiefs and other indigenous leaders, including Sinclair, Archibald and Casimir.Glavin is not the only National Post writer who got things wrong about the spread of the mass graves and genocide hoaxes. Tristin Hopper, also one of the paper’s leading investigative journalists, argued in a September 6 2023 editorial titled “Who Started Calling Residential School Burial Sites Mass Graves?” that:“But there’s just one problem with claims that this (the existence of mass graves) was all an engineered (indigenous) hoax: The preliminary claims of First Nations performing the surveys did not state that these were “mass graves,” that they were deliberately concealed or that they were the result of homicide. At least in the beginning, the claims of “mass graves” or mass murder would stem mostly from foreign news outlets.”As the many resolutions or statements about mass graves that followed one after the other from indigenous leaders, associations, including the Saddle Lake Cree Indian Reserve, the Final Resolution of Union of British Columbian Chiefs, representing more than 150 of the province’s Indian Bands and the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations, representing the 203 First Nations in British Columbia, Hopper’s assessment is as erroneous as Glavin’s.To excuse indigenous culpability, Meagan Walker-Williams, a Cowichan Tribes member, even asserted in a September 14 2023, National Post editorial that “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.”The fabricated assertion that indigenous leaders and activists, including Murray Sinclair, are too ignorant to know the difference between individual and collective burials is as incomprehensible as it is racist.Terry Glavin and Tristin Hopper are undoubtedly correct to rebuke journalists who don’t ask hard questions of indigenous leaders. We should thank them for that. But they and their acolytes have painted a skewed picture in their exposes, carefully omitting the portions consisting of false or unproven claims from those indigenous leaders and their “knowledge keepers” who invented or arbitrarily repeated the stories in the first place.Why these and other seasoned journalists chosen instead to parrot outrageous indigenous accusations in a respectful manner is unknown. However, it looks like just another example of the old-fashioned morally sentimental, unidimensional noble savage view of indigenous people as uncorrupted by Western civilization; far worse, it may be an implicit acceptance that because distortion, exaggeration and outright prevarication are expected aboriginal defensive responses to a troubled colonial history, they should either be forgotten or forgiven. If it is the latter, such a sentiment deserves to be called for what it is: the soft bigotry of low indigenous expectations for those fully assimilated indigenous leaders and advisors who should be judged by the same standards as all other Canadians.As this year ends, promoting these inventions is more dangerous than ever because they lie at the heart of indigenous attempts to outlaw what its proponents call “residential school denialism,” an outcome, if successful, that would make pieces like this one and Glavin’s impossible to publish in 2024.Hymie Rubenstein is editor of REAL Indigenous Report and a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba.James C. McCrae is a former attorney general of Manitoba and Canadian citizenship judge.
