'Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus' is a line from an editorial by Francis Pharcellus Church titled, "Is There a Santa Claus?".It appeared in the New York newspaper The Sun Sept. 21, 1897, and became one of the most famous editorials ever published. Written in response to a letter by eight-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon asking whether Santa Claus was real, the editorial became so popular over the years, The Sun began republishing it during the Christmas season, including every year from 1924 to 1950, when the paper ceased publication..We are amid our very own magical transformation of a fairy tale to proven fact with the widespread assertion promulgated by our increasingly woke political elite and academic intelligentsia of a longstanding and ongoing genocide committed against Canada’s indigenous people. Its most compelling evidence is the alleged but unproven existence of thousands of “missing” Indian Residential School (IRS) students presumably buried in graves whose wooden markers disintegrated decades ago..Those who refuse to accept these assertions are said to be guilty of “genocide denial,” a new moral failing that may soon be elevated to the level of a hate crime, possibly punishable by imprisonment and “re-education” Chinese Uyghur-style..Kimberly Murray, former executive director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2010-15), was appointed as Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools. As special interlocutor, she's charged with identifying and recommending measures for a new federal legal framework for the treatment and protection of unmarked graves and burial sites of children at former residential schools..Murray has also usurped a role unspecified by her current mandate, indeed one that betrays her duty to “contribute to building a relationship of trust and respect between Canada and First Nations, Inuit and Métis” when she testified before a Senate committee on March 21 that:."Every time an announcement of [Indian Residential School] anomalies or reflections or recoveries are made, communities are being inundated by people emailing them and phoning them and attacking them and saying, 'This didn't happen,'" she told senators.."I sit here and tell you this happened. I have seen the records. I have seen the photographs of children in coffins. We need to all fight this denialism and it shouldn't be left to the survivors to have to do that.".“Fight this denialism,” which she has elsewhere also linked to genocide, even in the absence of publicly available “photographs of children in coffins,” in the same way it was fought by Francis Pharcellus Church in 1897, by pushing the boundaries of western logic in denying no genocide evidence does not mean that genocide did not occur, is her regnant axiom..Yes, those who are skeptics about the existence of murdered aboriginal children buried in mass graves are wrong, she claims..In Church’s words, “They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds.”.But as three outstanding researchers recently and carefully documented:.“So far, Murray’s activist narrative (about IRS students) is accepted without question, despite the fact there are no police records or media reports throughout the history of the residential school system of any parent searching for a child who went missing from a residential school. Not one of those thousands of children who supposedly vanished in a murderous residential school system had a parent who went to the media or the police for assistance in finding a missing child.”.Factual data like this is irrelevant because, yes, Canada, there has always been an indigenous genocide. “Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no” indigenous genocide. “We should have no enjoyment except in sense and sight,” even though the invisible indigenous genocide has seen Canada’s aboriginal population explode from around 100,000 in 1871, 12 years before the first “genocidal” government-funded Indian Residential Schools began operating, to more 1.8 million today, a 1,700% increase. What a genocide!.Not believe in indigenous genocide! Nobody sees indigenous genocide, but that is no sign that there is no indigenous genocide..“The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they're not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world,” said Church..“You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real?”.How can anyone with an ounce of imagination doubt those words?.Ah, Canada, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding than our very own indigenous genocide..Hymie Rubenstein is editor of The REAL Indigenous Issues newsletter and a retired professor of anthropology, The University of Manitoba
