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May 30, 2022 • 28 minutes ago • 7 minutes reading • 62 comments Prime Minister Justin Trudeau places a teddy bear on a small flag in a field before a ceremony on the site of a former residential school in Cowessess First Nation, Sask., July 6, 2021 Photo from Liam Richards / Pool via REUTERS
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First Reading is a daily newsletter that keeps you up to date on the plight of Canadian politicians, all curated by Tristin Hopper’s own National Post. To receive an early version sent directly to your inbox every Monday to Thursday at 18:00 ET (and 9:00 on Saturday), register here.
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TOP HISTORY
This week marks one year since Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, announcing the results of a ground-penetrating radar survey that found 215 underground anomalies suspected to be unmarked graves of students who died while attending an Indian housing school. accommodation in Kamloops.
Tk’emlúps management may have believed that they were simply releasing an update of a fact that is already well known in the indigenous community: Thousands of children do not return from a residential school and are almost always buried on site, usually as a cost-saving measure. .
But this announcement marked the beginning of one of Canada’s most seismic accounts of the trauma of the Indian resident school system. Canada Day was virtually abolished, historic churches were set on fire and flags were held half-raised for five months – the longest in the history of the British Commonwealth. Ground-based radar surveys in Canada soon added hundreds of new alleged graves to the original 215.
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The first page of the press release of May 27, 2021, which started it all. Photo by Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc
But so much of the media and political stories this summer were fake. There were no “mass graves.” There was no evidence of mass murder. There is no evidence that the graves were deliberately hidden. In several cases, the First Nations explicitly emphasized that radar surveys were likely to reveal graves without any direct links to nearby residential schools.
In a comprehensive article for the National Post, veteran writer Terry Glavin delves into how the national story of unmarked graves is so quickly derailed – and how the story has been largely distracted by non-native voices.
It took weeks to put this story together. I will have more background here soon. For now: no, this is not a story about local people telling lies. This is a story about white people who lose their damn minds. https://t.co/dQPWdhhoqK
– Terry Glavin @ 立 @ (@TerryGlavin) May 26, 2022
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As Glavin wrote in his Substack, “what happened last summer was not for local people telling lies or deceiving the government. It would be more accurate to say the opposite. “
Below we have summarized the main points of what is true – and what is not – of what you heard in last summer’s report on the graves of residential schools.
(Before we begin, a brief reminder that the following points on unmarked graves do very little to repeal a system that still stands as one of Canada’s biggest national mistakes. The whole goal of the system was to assimilate indigenous children In addition, Indian residential schools have consistently suffered horrific levels of infant death rates, which have been quite disproportionate to non-indigenous schools. and many former students remember experiencing an almost constant state of starvation. Above all, attendance was mandatory; families who tried to take their children out of school faced arrest or denial of food rations.)
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IT HAS NEVER BEEN A SECRET THAT THE MASS DEATH OF STUDENTS IS ENDEMIC IN SCHOOLS
Much of the political and international reaction to the discovery of alleged school graves in apartment buildings was that they were children whose deaths were somehow hidden. While it is probably true that most Canadians were previously unaware of the sheer mortality rate in Indian residential schools (some of which had a mortality rate of up to 20 percent in the late 19th century), this is a fact that would have been easily known even to the generations of Canadians who support the continuation of the system of Indian resident schools.
Indigenous people have always been aware that almost all Canadian housing schools are home to children’s graves, and First Nations leaders last summer were quick to say that the Kamloops discovery was no surprise. As for everyone else, Glavin noted earlier that there are, in fact, many cases in the country’s Canadian history facing a national account of the appalling conditions in boarding schools – just for now to be immediately forgotten. The first such case actually happened exactly 100 years ago, when the Chief Medical Inspector of the Ministry of Indian Affairs publicly resigned in protest against the astonishingly high rate of tuberculosis deaths in residential schools.
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NOT A FIRST NATION CLAIMS IT HAS FOUND A MASS GRAVE
The New York Times was one of the first publications to name the Kamloops discovery as a “mass grave,” and the phrase helped turn grave finds into international history. But none of the first four nations to announce the discovery of unmarked graves last summer said it was anything other than individual marked graves that, for whatever reason, have seen their location forgotten in an extraordinary time.
Evidence of unmarked graves at St. Mary’s Residential School are literally in a clean place. #MissionBCLeft: a 1958 funeral photo displayed on an information board outside the OMI Cemetery in Heritage Park. Right: Photo taken from the same place today. pic.twitter.com/CJsH9kO1QK
– Patrick Penner (@portmoodypigeon) July 6, 2021
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These same first nations were equally cautious about delineating the boundaries of penetrating radar. Studies could identify soil disturbances that are likely to be caused by human burials, but until excavations are carried out, they will not be able to explicitly confirm the graves or who was in them. To date, no such excavations have been completed.
“Local indigenous leaders, who were most directly involved in last summer’s discoveries, were the most cautious of all the various participants in the fierce public debate,” Glavin wrote. “In some cases, these local leaders have never even intended to draw public attention to the work of the ‘basic truth’ they have observed in residential schools, which are ultimately the subject of all these shocking headlines.”
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MANY OF THE DISCOVERED GRAVES WERE IN FAMOUS CEMETERIES (AND SOME OF THEM WERE FOUND THAT THEY HAVE UNCONNECTED RELATIONSHIPS WITH CLOSE RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS)
One of the most widely circulated photos from last summer was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, kneeling at the alleged location of more than 751 unmarked graves near the former Marieval Indian Housing School. What was not immediately apparent from the photo, however, was that Trudeau was kneeling in a meadow that was apparently located in a larger cemetery with mostly marked graves.
A group of women are walking in a cemetery near the site where 751 unmarked graves were found outside Mariewal, Sask. Photo by Jeff Robbins / AFP
In announcing the alleged 751 graves, Cowessess First Nation was quite explicit in noting that these were graves with a Roman Catholic cemetery whose markers had been lost, and that it was not entirely clear whether they contained indigenous people, let alone students from residential schools. . . As a former Marieval student later told the CBC, “We always knew they were there… It’s just that the media picked up unmarked graves and the story actually came out of there because that’s what happens.”
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Glavin found that this was a similar story with 182 alleged graves declared outside Cranbrook, British Columbia, and 160 on the island of Penelacut in British Columbia. In the latter case, the figure of 160, spread by the Canadian media, seems …
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