But don't take my word for it:
In the seven months since this shocking news broke, not one body has been found, and not a single shovel-full of dirt has been excavated from the site in question. Contrary to the worldwide media coverage last summer, nothing, in fact, has been “discovered” on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
In a healthy society, this would be a scandal. A story that grabbed headlines for a week and inspired arson attacks that destroyed dozens of churches in Canada turns out to be based on flimsy, unexamined evidence at best, and an outright, pernicious lie at worst. ...
And then came the arson. In June, dozens of churches across Canada, most of them Catholic and some of them more than a century old, were burned to the ground. No church was safe. As my colleague Chris Bedford reported at the time, “In Calgary, 10 churches of various denominations were vandalized in a single night. A few days later, a Vietnamese church was set on fire — just hours after it held its first full service in more than a year.” ...
That was more than seven months ago. Not a single corpse has been exhumed from the site since then. No human remains, of children or anyone else, have been found and confirmed as a result of the radar search.
The person who performed the ground-penetrating radar survey, a “conflict anthropologist” named Sarah Beaulieu, said at news conference back in July that the “probable gravesites” could not be confirmed unless excavations were done. Her investigation covered only two acres of the total 160-acre site and, she said, had “barely scratched the surface.”
Professor Jacques Rouillard, professor emeritus in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal, recently published a detailed essay in The Dorchester Review on what has been found at this and similar sites — and what hasn’t. There is no evidence, writes Rouilliard, in any of the historical records kept by the government, that deaths of indigenous children at these schools were ever covered up, or that any corpses were ever deposited in mass, unmarked graves which were kept secret, and parents of the children were never informed, as tribal groups repeatedly charged and the media dutifully repeated last summer.
There are indeed individual graves on the grounds of the Kamloops school, which includes a still actively used cemetery. Children who died at the school when it was still in operation — most often of tuberculosis but also of influenza, yellow fever, and typhoid — were sometimes buried in that cemetery in individual marked graves, alongside priests and nuns who were buried there. ...
Many of the grave-markers at these schools are now gone, not because anyone was trying to hide them but because it was common in these remote areas to make grave markers from wood, and many of them simply disintegrated over the years.
What all of this suggests, especially in the complete absence of any confirmed evidence of a “mass grave” or a coverup, is that the whole story is a giant fiction. Its purpose was to provoke a moral panic, demonize the Catholic Church, and make global headlines by peddling historical grievances. And it worked exactly as planned.
But understand this: seven months on from this manufactured moral panic, there will be no backtracking from the media, no following up about the hundreds of corpses “discovered” in a “mass grave.” There will be no questions asked, and no demands for evidence.
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The Canadian government and the media have some serious questions to face. Why didn’t they wait for proof before demoralizing the nation and sending it into a tailspin of anger and anti-Christian violence? Will there be an apology for that?
And why, after all this, are there still no plans to excavate in Kamloops? After the dramatic fallout for so many ordinary Canadians and Catholics, doesn’t the whole country deserve some answers?
I think we know the answers.
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