Some People Are "Special"

Shovels in the ground, please:

Here we go again. More announcements that “graves” have been found at former Indian Residential Schools, more flags lowered in mourning and more uncritical press coverage.

And yet times have changed. There is less news coverage of these events, there’s no federal flags flying at half-staff and there appears to be a marked lack of national angst.

The best example that things are different is over at the Law Society of British Columbia (LSBC) which has done a stunning reversal in how it sees the residential school graves controversy.

The LSBC is being sued by one of its own lawyers, Jim Heller, for libel. Heller claims he was accused of being a racist and a denialist for trying to get the LSBC to insert the word “potential” in educational material by the law society about the 215 “bodies” discovered at British Columbia’s Kamloops Indian Residential School (KIRS) in May 2021. ...

Meanwhile, earlier this month, The Times Colonist informed us in a headline, “Archival research has found 171 confirmed deaths at Kuper Island residential school, 50 more than previously thought.”

The story went on to relate how one survivor saw a nun killing a young girl by pushing her out a third-floor window; that a furnace near the school was believed to have been used to dispose of children and infants; that an area behind the school was used to bury victims of sexual assaults by nuns and priests (aborted fetuses and murdered infants were buried there as well) and that some children were put in burlap sacks, weighed down with anchors and tossed into the sea.

It is unfortunate that First Nations are reluctant, or unable, to provide precise details in these cases since they almost certainly warrant some kind of criminal investigation even at this very late date.

Money certainly wouldn’t be an issue.

Since Kamloops, the federal government has given $246.7 million (as of March this year) “to Indigenous communities and organizations to support community-led and Survivor-centric initiatives to document, locate and commemorate the children that did not return home and unmarked burial sites associated with former residential schools.”

And the money appears to be just the beginning. The government’s statement says that the current knowledge gathering, archival research and non-invasive fieldwork “is necessary before work can begin on exhumation, identification and, if it is the wish of families, repatriation of remains.”

To date, no “graves” have been exhumed, but if that is to happen, the costs will surely rise.

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The claim made in Sechelt, British Columbia, is that radar has identified the graves of 81 children. When the Kamloops hoax was announced, it made international headlines. The response to the latest hoax has been more muted. Only a few outlets have given it any coverage.  The Sechelt one didn’t make many waves, though the CBC dutifully called the radar anomalies unmarked graves. After a backlash over the inaccurate and inflammatory reporting, CBC reporter Alanna Kelly deleted the posting where she said graves have been found and locked down her account on X. People are getting sick and tired of being fed this hoax.

Another grift being carried out by many indigenous bands is to do GPR surveys over known cemeteries and then acting aghast when indications of graves are found. That was done in Grouard, Alberta, in 2022, and it was reported as a possible mass grave site. The news faded away when it became clear that all they had done was prove that a cemetery contained bodies. ...

At a church site in Manitoba and at a hospital site in Edmonton, activists made the error of actually excavating the alleged graves identified by the radar. In both cases, not a single body was found despite oral history claiming burials there. Since those failures, indigenous bands have learned not to excavate. They just do radar surveys and demand money.