It is a great honor (or rather, honour for those around the world) to welcome Barbara Kay, journalist and dear friend of Mark's, to SteynOnline!
"O what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." Apparently the original source for this famous dictum isn't Shakespeare, but Sir Walter Scott. But no matter – ain't it still the truth?
On May 26, 2021, most Canadians believed that our efforts at reconciliation with the aboriginal-rights movement were being received in good faith. A day later, that illusion was shattered. On May 27, 2021, B.C. First Nation chief, Roseanne Casimir, announced that 215 "unmarked graves had been discovered in an old orchard" not far from the former residential school, which was located at the heart of the Kamloops Reserve itself (She later amended it to 200 graves, but the "215" had already seized the spotlight and held it).
No graves had been discovered. Ground-Penetrating Radar had revealed "soil anomalies" that appeared consistent in shape with small coffins. But two months later, still without a shred of evidence to back up her claim, at the July 2021 Annual General Assembly of the Assembly of First Nations, Casimir presided over the acceptance of a resolution she had crafted, which in part stated: "Stand in solidarity with the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc and all survivors of the Residential School System and their families and assert that the mass grave discovered at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School reveals Crown conduct reflecting a pattern of genocide against Indigenous Peoples that must be thoroughly examined and considered in terms of Canada's potential breaches of international humanitarian and human rights law."
Did she really, fecklessly say those inflammatory words, "mass grave," a trope that points to a massacre? Yes, even though she knew the soil anomalies were at best unmarked individual graves. Could it be that Casimir and her colleagues literally "practice[d] to deceive"?
If Sarah Beaulieu, the Indigenous anthropology student operating the GPR, had accessed previous land use records, which would be the cautionary norm, she would have been informed of the existence of 2000 ft of septic drainage pipes, also suggestively shaped like coffins.
Why didn't she? Maybe because it would have drained plausibility from her "theory" that the shallowness of the alleged graves "fits with the knowledge-keepers' descriptions of children having to dig graves" in winter, when the ground was frozen – i.e., a scenario cut wholly from imaginary or dream cloth, not evidence.
If reporters had done their job, and asked basic questions, the claims would have been deflated on common sense alone. No six-year olds would have the strength to dig a grave in frozen ground. Even if they did, those forced into such gruesome tasks as children would have remembered and attest to them in adulthood. But so far, like so many other subjective "knowings" on the graves file, this remains rumour and hearsay.
For another thing, there were always aboriginal people on staff at Kamloops. They would have known of the alleged burials. Yet we are to believe there wasn't even one whistleblower amongst them? Moreover, nobody has actually named an allegedly missing, let alone a murdered child, nor has any family member of a Kamloops student ever reported that their child never came home from school. Common sense has been completely AWOL on this story, because nobody in media ever posed these and other simple questions of logic to the Kamloops spokespeople.
There are no "missing" children. I would urge readers interested in the evidence on this file to visit the website indianresidentialschoolrecords.com, created by independent researcher Nina Green. There you will find photocopies of all the original records for children at all the schools: application, entry, dates of arrival and departure, health, and cause of death (mostly tuberculosis).
And here is Green's granular analysis of the whole Kamloops trajectory, which includes suspicious murkiness about the GPR fishing expedition. One outtake from her account may whet your appetite for more, as it further supports a "practice-to-deceive" hypothesis: "While demanding that journalists not 'delve into' the story, the Kamloops Band was moving forward aggressively in attempting to involve the International Criminal Court in what both Chief Rosanne Casimir and Chief RoseAnne Archibald termed a 'crime scene'."
The ICC! (The ICC turned them down.) There is something rather pathetic and creepy, even within the generally creepy paradigm of "Grievance Culture," about aboriginal activists' fixation on the demonstrably undeserved rhetorical brass ring of "genocide" to describe the Indian Residential Schools (IRS).
The kitsch imagery they favour, like rows of little new shoes - an image associated with old, worn shoes of actual victims at Holocaust memorials - as background for schlock performance theatre - smack of Holocaust envy, an unwholesome fetish, not to mention proof of our moribund culture, in which natives' – and only natives' - perpetual reverence for past trauma is considered a status symbol, trumping the resilience and forward-facing ambition that leveraged success for other historically disadvantaged minorities.
To believe that the IRS were systemically genocidal indicates willed ignorance and an overweening sense of exceptionalism. If it is colonial genocide you seek, look at the sickening Spanish adventures in the Americas, during which 24 of an original 25 million Indigenous Mexicans were liquidated. By contrast, there is no record of a single indigenous child in Canada that was killed by anyone in authority at any IRS.
The Kamloops tribe has announced they intend to excavate "next year," but first they must consult with 38 other First Nations. Don't hold your breath. They're in a bind of their own making. They knew the alleged "mass" or even unmarked graves scandal could easily prove to be a house of cards, but the national spotlight, the mass guilt trip and the political power it generated were too alluring to forgo.
The "denialists" – mostly retired scholars backed by long professional careers of honorable research into Indigenous history and culture, who voiced their skepticism from the get-go - have paid a very heavy price for the abdication of responsibility on this file by the media, government, professional associations, school boards, universities, Indigenous militants who trivialize the Holocaust, and the sycophantic non-Indigenous yes-men and women who carry water for them.
It has been a demoralizing experience for them and indeed for all Canadians who put their faith in a "reconciliation" that has turned out instead to be a demand for never-ending atonement, by whatever means necessary (a phrase with intended ominous resonance). All Canadians capable of critical thinking feel gaslighted by the Kamloops deception. Because they were.
It's open thread time! Log into SteynOnline and share your thoughts with Barbara. Commenting privileges are among the many perks of membership in The Mark Steyn Club. While going off topic is permitted, do stick to the other rules as you engage: no URLs, no profanity, and no ad hominem attacks. Thank you.
