The Scandal That Probably Doesn't Exist
Also Known As: Canada's BLM and Kevin Annett is an asshole
This is a story that has always bothered me. And it probably would have sat unwritten, except one of my Facebook friends hasn’t changed their profile picture, and it still has a virtue-signal overlay of “RIP 215 babies, 2021, Every Life Matters”.
The History
For background: Canada has a pretty bad history when it comes to aboriginals. We also have reserves (reservations, for my American friends) in remote places, treaties that were tenuously adhered to, and all kinds of atrocities that we picked up along the way.
One such atrocity was the Residential School System.
Historians will almost never mention this, but while treaties were being negotiated with the Brits, schools were negotiated as a concession from England, because the Natives actually wanted European educations. Historians won’t mention that because in current contexts it feels like victim blaming, and will probably get them yelled at, because the native negotiators could never have foreseen what the school system would end up being before it was dismantled. From Treaties One and Two;
And with a view to show the satisfaction of Her Majesty with the behaviour and good conduct of Her Indians parties to this treaty, She hereby, through Her Commissioner, makes them a present of three dollars for each Indian man, woman and child belonging to the bands here represented.
And further, Her Majesty agrees to maintain a school on each reserve hereby made whenever the Indians of the reserve should desire it.
Eventually, it was determined by the Canadian government that the natives were not integrating to their satisfaction, and they set out to correct that by shipping young natives off to residential schools. What they got at those schools was a mixed bag, the schools were run by different organizations, often a church, they had different mandates, and they treated their charges differently. Some kids made it through the system fine. Most made it through with some level of abuse. Some died. Regardless of health outcomes, it’s been fairly referred to as a cultural genocide - The kids were forced to not speak their native languages, they were not taught their histories, failure to adhere to standards was met with beatings, missed meals, and awful living conditions. As a result of that alongside a general lack of care, mortality at these schools was high. It is a genuine black spot on Canadian history, and while I feel the need to contextualize that history, no amount of context makes what happened acceptable.
Over the 100 years these schools operated, it is estimated that approximately 150,000 students were housed for some amount of time, and about about 4,000 students died. That 2-3% mortality rate is somewhat explained by these schools operating in a time of endemic flu and tuberculosis, but represents about twice the normal mortality rate from the population at large.
Which is why this story was so easy to believe.
What Happened?
In 2021 a chief from the Kamloops area said that 215 bodies had been discovered in a previously unknown mass grave. This ignited a firestorm.
A movement was born; people wearing orange shirts declaring that “Every Life Matters”. Radio hosts, news orgs, politicians, activists… Everyone seemed to have an opinion, they waded in talking about justice for those kids. Two churches in the area were burned, statues of the queen were toppled.
One of my friends has an uncle who was involved in the residential school system in that area, he recounted to me, angrily, a conversation he had where he talked to his uncle about it, and declared incredulously that his uncle said that he didn’t know anything about this site.
After the original 215 were reported in Kamloops, there were a slew of other reported mass graves found on Residential School System campuses, the largest of them was 700 in Marieval, SK. Because this was a loud, quickly developing, very messy story, there was a range of reporting on it, but the prevailing narrative online, in coffee shops and around the dinner table was that we were discovering thousands of new graves of dead children. All told, there were something like 4000 new “graves” identified, basically doubling the number of dead children on record, because the Truth and Reconciliation commission knew about none of these ones.
Holy Shit, Right?
The problem is that there almost certainly aren't 4000 new graves.
People who questioned the narrative in the wake of the primal scream of a reaction to the original stories were initially silenced, being called supporters of the school system or genocide deniers, but over time the story has quietly been debunked and the people who were first to ask questions were (to varying degrees) vindicated.
Part of the reason this story hit so hard, I think, is because it was unexpected. Even though it was unexpected, we’ve been trained to think the worst of the residential school system (with good reason), and so it was still believable. The initial reaction for a whole lot of people wasn’t to think about it too hard. But if one took a minute to think about it, it didn’t really make sense. Like I said earlier, the estimated number of kids that died in the system was approximately 4000. This number has been used by The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is a group that was created with the mandate of trying to untangle the history of Canada’s abuse towards native people. I think it beggars belief that the number of kids who died in the system could be twice that and we not know about it. There would be families missing children. Stories. Oral history. There wasn’t. I admit, I had doubts, but I didn’t speak out, because there was at least the possibility in the back of my mind that this had actually happened, and if it had, I had no intention of carrying even a little bit of water for the church.
To be fair to the narrative, some of the sites identified really are unmarked graves. Some of the sites were found at residential schools that were also churches and had the local graveyard on site. But in those cases we’re not sure if any of them are previously unknown native students, or 300 year old corpses of adult settlers who were mauled by bears, although the latter is, I think, more reasonable. Regardless… For the most part, we’re not even sure that these are even graves. From the very beginning, wording was used to elicit an emotional response: Residential Schools, which we were taught to hate, Dead Children, which doesn’t need an explanation, and Mass Graves, which certainly elicits a mental image of atrocity and a lack of care. All of that was said without evidence of a single bone in most of these sites. The “mass graves” were found using ground penetrating radar, the radar at Kamloops found 215 “anomalies” in the ground, which were assumed to be graves. This is particularly egregious considering the Kamloops site is now an apple orchard, and my understanding is that the tree roots are enough to create a anomalies. I’m not saying that those anomalies aren’t bodies. I’m not saying those bodies aren’t children. I’m not saying they were buried with care. I’m not saying that these aren’t previously unknown bodies. But I am saying that it’s also possible that the anomalies are tree roots.
Instead of testing that… Instead of exhuming even a single anomaly to look at, in Kamloops, the decision has been made not to know. Because their belief is enough. They will mourn the children whose names they do not know, and deprive their families the closure of knowing what happened to them, out of respect. Or so the narrative goes. Meanwhile, every time the anomalies have been exhumed by Bands with a little more curiosity, they’ve failed to find bodies. In fact, to today, not a single anomaly has been verified to be a body. There have been cases of bodies found buried on sites, but they were generally known about, if not marked. 200 years can be hell on graveyards.
Terry Glavin has done a lot of reporting and interviews on the issue, a few choice quotes:
Not a single child among the 3,201 children on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 2015 registry of residential school deaths was located in any of these places. In none of these places were any human remains unearthed.
This is not to engage in “residential school denialism,” or to downplay the suffering endured by Indigenous people in the 139 mostly church-run and mostly Catholic institutions that were in operation from the 1820s to the 1990s. This is not to dispute the proposition that the residential school system’s policy amounted to cultural genocide, at least in its foundational years, or to disregard the brutal sexual, emotional and psychological abuse inflicted on the institutions’ inmates.
And
One of the most totemic images from the turbulent summer of 2021 depicted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holding a teddy bear, kneeling at a little flag marking the site of a grave near the former Marieval residential school on the Cowessess reserve in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley.
Except it wasn’t a just-discovered residential school burial ground. The graveyard where Trudeau knelt was a Catholic cemetery, a community cemetery. Children and adults, Indigenous and settler, were buried there, going back generations. The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, the successor to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, lists nine students who died at Marieval in the century between the school’s opening and its closing in 1997.
The “discovery” of unmarked graves at the Marieval cemetery was one of the most dramatic front-page sensations that circled the world last summer. The June 24 headline in the Washington Post was typical: Hundreds of Graves Found at Former Residential School for Indigenous Children in Canada. The number of graves reportedly discovered: 751.
Except that’s not what happened.
The Cowessess people noted from the outset that they didn’t discover any graves; the crosses and headstones had gone missing under disputed circumstances decades earlier, and ground-penetrating radar had been brought in to enumerate and pinpoint the location of each burial. Cowesses Chief Cadmus Delorme told CBC News: “This is a Roman Catholic grave site. It’s not a residential school grave site.”
Ouch.
How did this happen?
Glavin points out in his National Post article that
What made last summer’s upheavals different from previous “overdue reckoning” episodes wasn’t just the innovation of ground-penetrating radar in the search for the remains of the children who died after being enrolled at residential schools.
It was also that the initial “mass grave” references appeared to lend credence to a QAnon-like conspiracy theory popularized by a defrocked white United Church minister in the 1990s. Among his many baseless claims was that there was a country-wide archipelago of secret mass graves containing the remains of thousands of children murdered by priests, and behind the scandal was a vast cover-up orchestrated by Indigenous leaders, prime ministers and the Vatican.
He also blames the polarization of the culture war, which I’m sure contributed, but pales in comparison to this. I have no idea why he hand waved by this story, because it should be the story, and everyone should know this asshole’s name.
Kevin Annett is a relatively famously defrocked United Church minister up here in Canada. Famous in a “Oh yeah I remember that story” way more than a “Oh yeah I remember that guy” way. In the early 1990s, Annett was a novice minister whose first assignment was to serve a dwindling congregation in Port Alberni, BC. It wasn’t long before United Church officials were informed that Annett was turning his Sunday services into something resembling a series of cathartic, guerilla-theatre testimonials about Satanic ritual abuse. To put it bluntly: He’s a fucking nut. A Can-anon conspiracy theorist.
And that’s not all, he has previously said that one of Canada’s most respected First Nations’ leaders is trafficking in children from Northern British Columbia in a profitable pedophilia ring that’s run out of the West Hastings Street premises of the swish Vancouver Club. His clients are Vancouver judges, politicians, and church leaders.
And that back in the 1930s, a team of German doctors arrived at the Kuper Island Indian residential school and began conducting strange medical experiments on the children. Employing large hypodermic needles, they injected some sort of toxin directly into the chests of the school’s young inmates, and several were killed as a result.
And that as recently as the 1950s and 1960s, aboriginal children at a Vancouver Island medical research facility were tortured with electrodes implanted in their skulls. At least one child was beaten to death with a whip fitted with razors.
And that at the Hobbema and Saddle Lake Indian residential schools in Alberta, children were incinerated in furnaces. At St. Anne’s Indian residential school in Fort Albany, Ontario, children were executed in an electric chair. At McGill University in Montreal, there is a mass grave containing the bodies of aboriginal children killed in experiments undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency’s top-secret MK-ULTRA program.
None of these things happened. He has not one since he started spouting these stories out in the 90’s produced an iota of evidence. The poor RCMP officers who were tasked with taking these claims seriously enough to investigate have come up with nothing.
But for some reason this man with an obvious and unhealthy disposition towards conspiracy theories related to the church and native issues continued to be taken seriously. He was the driving force behind using ground penetrating radar at these sites, it was him who first forwarded the idea of these being the previously unknown graves of residential school children. Which means that the scandal came first circle: He was the one doing the ground penetrating radar tests that game some kind of legitimacy to his own baseless conspiracy theory about a network of hidden mass graves.
The damage this man has done to the social cohesion is indescribable.
Does Charles Adler regret accusing Bishop Nguyen of culpability and retract his demand for an apology? (This was always stupid because Nguyen was in Vietnam at the time those school operated, but Charles hasn’t let facts get in his way for a while).
Does my friend regret the angry words and disbelief he gave to his uncle? Who probably didn’t know about the graves because there probably aren’t any?
Does Justin Trudeau regret not only hopping on board the wagon, but taking a teddy bear as a prop to a photoshoot at the grave of a Catholic in order to smear their church?
How do the people that burned those curches feel?
Are those statues ever coming back?
Does Annett regret a single damn thing he’s ever done?
In order: Probably not, Yes (we talked about it, he apologized), Probably not, I doubt they know how wrong they are, No, And I think he’s incapable.
Which is why, if there’s any moral to this story, it’s that we should probably wait for more details before working ourselves up. That the media isn’t afraid to jump headfirst into being wrong. That politicians are almost eager to do the same. And that Kevin Annett is an asshole who deserves fame in all the worst ways.