The young anthropologist who conducted the GPR search later added a note of caution: only a forensic investigation could confirm that these were indeed burials. But a moral panic had already been unleashed. Politicians and the media immediately seized on the first announcement, and “burials of missing children” was the storyline that ricocheted around Canada and much of the world. Meanwhile, several other First Nations that had at one time hosted residential schools hired their own anthropologists armed with GPR and announced similar discoveries. Weeks later, almost exactly a year ago, in June 2021, the Cowessess First Nation announced the discovery of 751 unmarked graves at the site of another former residential school in Saskatchewan.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set the tone of the public response on 30 May by ordering Canadian flags to be flown at half-mast on all federal building to honour the “215 children whose lives were taken at the Kamloops residential school”, thus elevating the possible burials to the status of murder victims and making Canada sound like a charnel house of murdered children. Unprecedented in Canadian history, flags remained at half-mast until Remembrance Day, 11 November, and were returned to normal height only after the Assembly of First Nations gave its OK.

In spite of this ostentatious virtue-signalling, Trudeau got into trouble when he skipped an event in Kamloops on 30 September to commemorate the missing children. Apparently, our surfer dude prime minister preferred to ride the waves at Tofino on the Pacific coast rather than attend a commemorative ceremony. To make up for his faux pas, he had to go to Kamloops on 18 October for another memorial ceremony, at which he was harangued for several hours.

But not all the events in the wake of the Kamloops announcement were so amusing. Sixty-eight Christian churches, mostly Roman Catholic, were vandalised or even burned to the ground. Many of these were historical church buildings still used and revered by native people. The pretext for arson and vandalism was that the Kamloops Indian Residential School had been run by a Catholic religious order, as had 43% of all residential schools. Imagine the outrage if 68 synagogues or mosques had been vandalised and burned. Yet the attacks on 68 Catholic churches passed with only mild criticism.

An article in the New York Times was typical of media commentary about the unmarked graves. It was first published under the headline “Horrible History: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada” on 28 May and updated on 5 October under the same title. It asserted that: “For decades, most Indigenous children in Canada were taken from their families and forced into boarding schools. A large number never returned home, their families given only vague explanations, or none at all.”

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Because the corporate press take their cue from the New York Times, its perspective echoed widely. The discovery of the so-called unmarked graves was chosen by Canadian newspaper editors as the “news story of the year”. And the World Press Photo of the Year award went to “a haunting image of red dresses hung on crosses along a roadside, with a rainbow in the background, commemorating children who died at a residential school created to assimilate Indigenous children in Canada”.

But the award this news report should have won is for fake news of the year. All the major elements of the story are either false or highly exaggerated.

First, no unmarked graves have been discovered at Kamloops or elsewhere. GPR has located hundreds of soil disturbances, but none of these has been excavated, so it is not known whether they are burial sites, let alone children’s graves. At her original press conference, the Chief of the Kamloops Indian Band called these findings unmarked graves, and the media, politicians, and even Pope Francis ran with the story without waiting for proof.

Similar claims from the chiefs of other Indian reserves ran into grave difficulty (no pun intended) because the GPR research was conducted in whole or in part on community cemeteries located near the sites of residential schools. It would hardly be surprising to find burial sites in a cemetery! But again, since no excavations have been conducted, it is not known whether these unmarked graves contain the bodies of children.

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North American Indians did not conduct burials; they usually exposed the bodies of the dead to be worn away by predators and the elements. Christian missionaries introduced the practice of burial. But Indian graves were usually marked by simple wooden crosses that could not long withstand the rigours of Canadian weather. Thus Indian reserves today contain probably tens of thousands of forgotten unmarked graves of both adults and children. To “discover” these with ground-penetrating radar proves nothing without excavation.

Second, there are no “missing children”. This concept was invented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), whose members spoke at various times of 2,800 or 4,200 Indian children who were sent to residential schools but never returned to their parents. Indeed, some children died at residential schools of diseases such as tuberculosis, just as they did in their home communities. But the legend of missing students arose from a failure of TRC researchers to cross-reference the vast number of historical documents about residential schools and the children who attended them.

In the fake news stories, the “unmarked graves” are presumed to be populated by the “missing children”, who died at residential school. Lurid tales of torture and murder, of babies thrown into the furnace and hanging from meat hooks, make the stories more colourful. However, the notion of missing children cannot stand up to critical scrutiny. Indian parents, like other parents, loved their children and certainly would have noticed if they went away to school and never came back. But no inquiries about missing Indian children were ever filed with the police. Moreover, children were carefully tracked in the residential school system. Similar to boarding schools all over the world, each child received a number upon admission for keeping track of clothing and other possessions.

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The federal Department of Indian Affairs also recorded students because it paid a per capita subsidy to the schools. It reviewed admission records meticulously because it didn’t want to pay for the white and Métis students who sometimes got into the residential schools, even though they were supposed to be only for Indians. On the other side, the residential schools were equally motivated to keep track of students because their income depended on the per capita subsidies. If students disappeared, their subsidy would have decreased.

Third, stories about Indian residential schools are almost always accompanied by the frightening claim that 150,000 students were “forced to attend” these schools, but the claim is misleading at best. Scholars generally agree that more students attended day schools on Indian reserves than went away to residential schools. Moreover, a large number didn’t go to any school at all. It wasn’t until 1920 that school attendance was made compulsory for Indian children, and enforcement was often lax. It was estimated in 1944 that upwards of 40% of Indian children were not in any kind of school.

For students who did attend residential school, there had to be an application form signed by a parent or other guardian. Many of these forms still exist and can be seen in online government archives. The simple truth is that, despite allegations of physical and sexual abuse, many Indian parents saw the residential schools as the best option available for their children. Cree artist Kent Monkman’s famous painting The Scream, showing missionaries and mounted policemen snatching infants from the arms of their Indian mothers, is a fever dream of the imagination. It is not even close to an accurate depiction of historical reality, not even if taken metaphorically.

*

How could the fake news story of unmarked graves, with its attendant legends of missing children ripped from the arms of their mothers, have gained such wide currency among political and media elites? The short answer is that it fits perfectly into the progressive narrative of white supremacy, of the white majority in Canada oppressing racial minorities. But there is also a specific etiology of the unmarked grave story.

Prior to 1990, residential schools enjoyed largely favourable coverage in the media, with many positive testimonials from students who had attended them. Indeed, alumni of the residential schools made up most of the emerging First Nations elite. Then Manitoba regional chief Phil Fontaine spoke on a popular Canadian Broadcasting Company radio show about how he had suffered sexual abuse at a residential school. After that things went south quickly. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples wrote critically about the schools; two historians wrote influential books; and lawyers launched multiple class actions on behalf of residential school “survivors”, claiming damages for physical and sexual abuse, as well as loss of language and culture at the schools.

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Rather than contest these lawsuits in court, the Liberal government of Paul Martin negotiated a settlement in 2005, which was accepted shortly afterwards by the newly elected Conservative government of Stephen Harper. Ultimately about $5 billion in compensation was paid to about 80,000 claimants, and Prime Minister Harper gave a public apology for the existence of residential schools in 2008.

Harper might have thought that the compensation payments and his apology would be the end of the story, but it was only the beginning. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he appointed took off in its own direction after the initial set of commissioners resigned and had to be replaced on fairly short notice. The TRC held emotional public hearings around the country at which “survivors” were invited to tell their stories without fact-checking or cross-examination. Most had already made claims for financial compensation in which the amount paid was proportional to the degree of sexual and physical abuse suffered, again without fact-checking or cross-examination. The TRC concluded that the residential schools amounted to “cultural genocide”.

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While this was going on, lawyers were bringing more class actions for other forms of Indian education, such as day schools on reserves, or boarding in town to attend public schools. Harper’s government offered some resistance in court, but the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, elected in 2015, preferred to settle out of court. Billions of dollars more are being paid out as a result.

Against this background, the claims of unmarked graves are a new money-maker. In August 2021, the federal government announced $321 million in special grants to First Nations for research about unmarked graves, and Canada’s 2022 budget pledged $275 million for “addressing the shameful legacy of residential schools”. Meanwhile indigenous leaders are pursuing claims for financial compensation from the Catholic Church.

Fake news does not arise and thrive in a political vacuum. While progressive ideology makes academia and the Liberal government a receptive audience, the indigenous industry has an obvious financial stake in driving the story. As long as the dollars flow, expect more stories about unmarked graves, yet no excavations to test the truth of the stories.

“We’re collectively mourning right now and in grief, and a lot of old wounds have been dug up and reopened because of this,” said David Pratt, of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations. In response, the capital city of British Columbia, Victoria, cancelled its celebrations, encouraging people to consider “what it means to be Canadian in light of recent events”.

A co-chair of the Canada Day committee in Fredericton said, “a quiet day of reflection may be the best way for our community to spend the holiday.” And cancelled their celebration. Sol Mamakwa, a Member of Provincial Parliament in Ontario, called on people to “reflect on the dark roots of Canada”. The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, whose father was PM during the time the residential schools operated, suggested the country think of “those for whom it’s not yet a day of celebration.”

Of course, celebration and consideration are not mutually exclusive. And despite the fact that the majority of Canadians wanted to celebrate on July 1, #CancelCanadaDay trending on Twitter was enough for these politicians.

But it seems the activists calling to cancel Canada were not interested in quiet reflection. A number of churches across the nation were vandalised and burned to the ground, in protest of the past. One wooden church named St. Ann’s near Hedley, British Columbia — where members of the Upper Similkameen Indian Band had been gathering for over a century — was reduced to ash. Not far away, The Sacred Heart — which has served the Penticon Indian Band since 1911 — was also razed.

Churches have been burned in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia. Almost all were on indigenous land, destroyed, apparently, in response to deaths of the children who were removed from their families sent to the schools in a policy of forced assimilation. But what do these acts really accomplish?

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It is true that Canada’s residential schools existed to destroy indigenous cultures and languages and were notorious for neglect and abuse. By the Seventies, most of these schools were run by the state. Nevertheless, the latest scandal has been widely misunderstood.

The “unmarked graves” that precipitated the cancellation of Canada Day and the church burnings were not the graves of murder victims — a fact many activists appear to misunderstand. Analysis of the remains shows that the children mostly died from the same causes as non-indigenous children at the time — things like influenza and tuberculosis.

Nor were the graves kept secret. A landmark 2015 report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had an entire volume entitled “Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials”. The report describes how “the practice throughout the system’s history was to keep burial costs low, and to oppose sending the bodies of students who died at schools back to their home communities,” hence why there were cemeteries on the school grounds. Very few articles about the report pointed out these facts (besides Brian Lilley’s in the Toronto Sun.)

Moreover, the graves were not intentionally unmarked; rather, the markers decayed over the years and were simply not maintained. The “discovery” of these unmarked graves was not a discovery, then, but something activists could have read up on years ago. It’s perfectly reasonable to be upset and disgusted by these facts. But it is important to get the facts right.

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There’s always a temptation, when you’re an activist, to peddle the narrative that presents your adversary in the worst possible light (and you — the valiant saviour — in the best). In Canada, the Left gives into this temptation far too frequently — and I say this as someone who was a devout leftist for most of my life. Few spoke out against the arson of religious buildings. Those who did included indigenous leaders, who were left dealing with the fall-out.

The Abbotsford News reported that a residential school survivor and Indigenous elder was “devastated” after St. Ann’s was razed. Her ancestors had helped build the church. Upper Similkameen Indian Band Chief Bonnie Jacobsen also expressed dismay and disbelief at the burnings, which she called, “complete disregard for our elders and ancestors,” adding, “Putting our lands, wildlife, and members at risk is not the way.” Keith Crow, the Lower Similkameen Indian Band Chief, said “I don’t see any positive coming from this and it’s going to be tough.”

These church burnings are part of a recent trend on the Left to destroy symbols or statues that some feel are representative of a regressive time. Statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II were also casualties of Canada Day this year. When progressives tweet their support of extreme actions — which tend not to have any effect on them personally, or even their communities — they ignore the fact that destruction and violence do not tend to effect positive change for the communities they claim to be defending.

Both the Sixties race riots and the LA riots in 1992 destroyed working class communities populated by people of colour, which which never truly recovered, despite decades of working to rebuild. Many families were forced to leave the neighbourhood, and countless businesses were permanently erased. More recently, the result of Antifa-led Black Lives Matter riots in Portland and Seattle has been to sow even further division and repulsion towards those who claim to seek justice but advocate for and perpetrate violence against anyone who fails to toe the line.

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Who are these activists helping, when they burn down local businesses and religious buildings? These responses are too often about projecting toughness and holier-than-thou “commitment” to the cause. Often, they go too far. Last week, executive director of the BC Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA), Harsha Walia, resigned after responding to the church burnings by tweeting, “Burn it all down.”

Walia, a long-time Left-wing activist, has long projected extreme views — advocating for censoring and cancelling those she deems political opponents. Before becoming the director of a civil liberties organisation she was, for instance, a supporter of a petition to have me fired from my job as an editor at a Left-wing publication in 2015 on account of my criticisms of the sex trade and advocacy for the Nordic model of prostitution law; she worked to have a talk by journalist and author Chris Hedges cancelled that same year, for the same reason. As a proponent for the full legalisation of the sex trade, Walia felt entitled to silence those who viewed the trade as inherently exploitative and wanted the men responsible for that exploitation held to account.

Advocating for the destruction of Canadian churches is an entirely inappropriate thing for a person representing an organisation supposedly committed to protecting freedom of religion and assembly to do. But the rush of power and validation activists experience in making such extreme statements ensures many speak without consideration for facts or consequences. Walia is, alas, also a typical product of modern progressive activism, which has devalued truth, rationality, and practicality in favour of short-sighted hyperbole.

This is why activists rushed to spin the “unmarked graves” story into a shocking discovery, hidden by a media and liberal government that is always at their mercy. The result of this rhetoric was arson that devastated people whose lives most urban liberals can’t imagine. Activists put themselves centre-stage, to the detriment of communities; it’s disturbing, this knee-jerk response towards violence, destruction, and cancellation. Leftist leaders, in particular, must resist this urge, lest the entire Left burn all its bridges and go up in flames. Policy must be rooted in facts and rational thought. But perhaps that’s a little too dull for the burn-it-all-down crowd.