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The public was informed in the summer of 2021 that a mass grave of Native American children had been discovered near the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, a Catholic boarding school that forced the assimilation of Native American youth.But no bodies had been recovered. Instead, the conclusion that the remains of 215 children — some as young as three — had been buried at the site was substantiated only by what the New York Times referred to as “ground-penetrating radar.”...A follow-up report in The Washington Post was even more shocking. It claimed that there were indications that a site near the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan was home to 751 unmarked graves.The claim was reported as the second announcement “in less than a month as the country reckons with the devastating legacy of one of the darkest chapters of its history.”...Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the two findings a “shameful reminder of the systemic racism, discrimination, and injustice that Indigenous peoples have faced — and continue to face — in this country.”It didn’t take long after the report on the alleged grave site at Kamloops before chaos ensued. A whopping 55 Canadian churches were the targets of vandalism or arson in the month following the first report. Of the sum, 21 churches had been lit on fire, with several (primarily Catholic) churches being burnt to the ground. Only one arrest was made in connection to the attacks.......Here’s an overview of each alleged site of mass graves, complete with both the original claims and the findings to date:Kamloops Indian Residential School:...Findings: The anomalies found by the radar were not graves but rather appears to be a septic field.Marieval Indian Residential School: ...Findings: The grave at Marieval was not a mass grave for Indigenous children, but a Catholic Cemetery.Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Roman Catholic Church:...Findings: An excavation conducted by an archaeological team at the University of Brandon found “no evidence of human remains.”Despite the lack of evidence for mass graves of Native American children at residential schools, those who’ve questioned the claims have been blasted as “denialists.” An article from the state-affiliated Canadian Broadcasting Corporation warned that “denialism is the last step of genocide.”
A hoax costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and appears to incite arson attacks against dozens of churches....In 2021, ... Canadian outlets picked up a story too sensational not to be true:Hundreds of indigenous First Nations children had been buried in unmarked graves at residential schools run by the Catholic Church in British Columbia.The Kamloops Indian Band sent around a press release that "confirmed" it. The statement claimed the remains of 215 children had been found with the help of an expert using ground-penetrating radar....Even now, Canada's biggest daily paper, The Globe and Mail, phrases its retraction in cagey terms."There has been no public confirmation of the discovery of any human remains," the paper conceded on May 30....The Globe and Mail editorial, titled "There is no reconciliation without truth," is a masterpiece of embarrassed equivocation, lamenting conditions for First Nations children at Canada's residential schools and even insisting the absence of bodies "does not mean children did not die there" before finally, eight paragraphs into the story, taking a smidgen of responsibility:"The media, including The Globe and Mail, did not initially scrutinize, much less challenge" the story, the editorial board concedes."The initial headlines and stories in the media simply stated as fact that the remains of 215 children had been found. Many of those early stories, including in this newspaper, made references to 'mass graves'," ......The narrative comes first — the facts must follow.This time they didn't, but next time?The narrative isn't going away just because its showcase story has been debunked.The consequences of the media hype aren't going away, either:Canadian taxpayers footed the bill to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars — real money in U.S. dollars, too — for First Nations groups to investigate "soil anomalies."The government simply doesn't know where the money went.
Five years ago, a moral panic gripped Canada over a story that was obviously fake but that so perfectly confirmed the biases of anti-Catholic liberals, no one in the media or the political establishment bothered to check its veracity.This of course was the hoax about the purported discovery of “mass graves” of indigenous children at what was once a government boarding school run by the Catholic Church. In late May 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation claimed that ground-penetrating radar had revealed hundreds of graves near the site of a former school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Tribal leaders cited the radar survey as proof that scores of indigenous Canadian children had been buried in unmarked mass graves at the school....There were a million reasons to be skeptical of the story when it first appeared, not least of which was the preliminary nature of the findings and the fact that the site in question had not been excavated for human remains. But major corporate media outlets like The New York Times, CNN, NPR, and The Globe and Mail simply repeated the central claim as fact, stating unequivocally that the remains of 215 children had in fact been found at Kamloops. CNN called it a “gruesome discovery.” The Washington Post said the mass graves story had “dragged the horror of Canada’s mistreatment of Indigenous people back into the spotlight.”The only problem was that it wasn’t true. There were no mass graves, no gruesome discovery, and no conspiracy of bigoted Catholic schoolmasters. That much has been obvious for years, if it wasn’t obvious enough when the story first appeared. Only now, five years later, The Globe and Mail, one of the major media outlets that helped perpetrate the hoax, has published an editorial mea culpa on the entire affair....So far, The Globe and Mail is the only media outlet that has owned up to its role in perpetrating what amounted to a blood libel against the Catholic Church. In 2024, I wrote about how no human remains had ever been exhumed from the sites of the purported mass graves, despite millions of dollars spent looking for them. Two years later, that’s still the case....In the meantime, vigilante violence broke out across the country. Dozens of Catholic churches were set ablaze by arsonists or vandalized in the wake of the Kamloops story, including historic churches that belonged to indigenous congregations, as well as churches that had no connection whatsoever to the residential schools. The ones that weren’t burned to the ground often had “charge the priests” scrawled in red paint on the walls. Trudeau said nothing. Most local authorities said nothing. The executive director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association posted on X, “Burn it all down.”Ironically, while this anti-Catholic hysteria unfolded there was an effort underway to criminalize dissent on the question of the residential schools. Indigenous rights activists demanded a law criminalizing what they called “residential school denialism” and categorizing it as hate speech. One member of Parliament, Leah Gazan, actually introduced a bill to that effect. In 2023, two years after the initial claims, the Trudeau government’s “special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with Indian residential schools” released a report calling for “urgent consideration” of civil and criminal penalties for “denialism,” citing laws passed in some countries that criminalize Holocaust denial.
