The BFD | The Myth of the Mass Graves

It’s a weird experience, encountering NPCs in the wild. These are the people who still watch the news on the telly — and believe it. I kid you not. The same people also actually believe politicians. “I think Dan/Jacinda is doing a great job,” they’ll say.

Ever seen Village of the Damned? It’s like that, but real.

For their part, to be fair, the NPCs find my attitude to the media and politicians equally incomprehensible and scary. Like real life “Angry NPC noises” memes, they are inclined to exclaim, “How do you know the media and politicians are lying?”

Because they are. Demonstrably. Repeatedly. They lied about “nooses” at protests. They lied about “Russian collusion”. They lied about Kyle Rittenhouse.

And, in Canada, they lied through their teeth about “mass indigenous graves”.

Prime Minister Trudeau and Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett wanted Canada to have its “George Floyd moment,” which was the event that catalyzed the paroxisms and convulsions that swept the United States exactly a year before the Kamloops story broke. They were quite clear about that. It’s what they wanted. And it’s what they got.

When Trudeau and the Canadian media hammered the claim that mass graves had been found at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, which was run by the Roman Catholic Church from 1890 to 1978, the story exploded. Catholic churches were burned down in revenge — attacks which Trudeau tacitly sanctioned.

Here’s the thing, though: no mass grave was ever discovered. The entire story was a lie.

No “mass grave” was discovered in Canada last year, and no Indigenous group claimed to have encountered anything of the kind. As for the sudden discovery of “unmarked graves,” so far as I have been able to determine no local Indigenous leader involved in the events even made such a claim.

So, where did the claim come from?

In Kamloops, 200 “targets of interest” that the Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc ground-penetrating radar specialist says are “probable” but “unconfirmed’ burials.

But even that “probable” claim is highly suspect. No-one has ever actually dug up a single human remain at the site. The entire basis of the story is that the parts of the ground around the old school were disturbed in some fashion in the past. That’s it. The “targets” aren’t even arranged in any sort of order as one might expect in a graveyard, but scattered randomly around the site.

Even so: the school operated for nearly a century. For much of its first few decades, child mortality in the US and Canada were abysmally high, for white and indigenous alike. Should anyone really be surprised that a poorly-funded institution that housed thousands of children might have a sizeable graveyard nearby? No malfeasance is even necessary, just the grim realities of the time.

The other “mass grave” claims were equally or even more suspect.

A Penelekut announcement about the discovery of at least 160 graves at a residential school site that wasn’t announced, weren’t claimed to be at a residential school site, and may not have been encountered last summer at all. The shocking discovery of 751 graves at a residential school site in Saskatchewan that were not discovered, and were in fact known graves in a Catholic cemetery where generations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people have buried their dead. The discovery of 182 burials that were in fact not discovered at the St. Eugene’s golf and casino resort, in a cemetery established by white people, where Indigenous and non-Indigenous people have been buried going back to the 1800s. And two Irish immigrants, buried at Shubenacadie, a century before a residential school was built there.

So, a concatenation of lies — and who has ever been held to account? Certainly not Justin Trudeau, much less the grifting, lying media who hammered the fake story relentlessly.