in World News The Discovery Of ‘Mass Graves’ Of Indigenous Canadian Children Was Actually A Massive Hoax
John Daniel Davidson Visit on Twitter @johnddavidson
Three years after reports of indigenous mass graves triggered the torching or vandalism of 85-plus churches, no graves have been found.
Three years ago, a major story broke in Canada that seemed to confirm every left-wing prejudice against Christians imaginable: A mass grave containing the remains of indigenous children was supposedly discovered on the grounds of what had once been a government boarding school run by the Catholic Church.
It turns out the whole thing was a hoax, a modern-day blood libel against Christians that ended with at least 85 Catholic churches across Canada destroyed by arson, vandalized, or desecrated. Canadian political and civil society leaders cheered on this destruction — and then doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to investigate the mass graves and create a “support fund” for indigenous people.
To this day, no human remains have been recovered at the site of the alleged mass grave, despite nearly $8 million spent looking for them.
You won’t hear the corporate press report on this story now, but in the summer of 2021, it was everywhere. And no wonder, it had all the elements of a just-so story. The mere historical existence of these former boarding schools, which operated from the 1860s to the 1990s, remains a source of outrage among liberal Canadians. The residential school system, as it was called, often separated indigenous Canadian children from their families and communities, forcing them to attend chronically underfunded government schools, the purpose of which was to assimilate and acculturate indigenous Canadians into European Canadian society.
The history here was bad enough — a racist outrage, as far as Canadian liberals were concerned. But then came news of the mass graves. The Catholic priests and nuns who ran the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia had, it seemed, callously discarded the corpses of hundreds of dead schoolchildren in mass graves on the school grounds. Or so said the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, which claimed that ground-penetrating radar had revealed the remains near the site of the former school.
In a healthy society, an explosive claim of this sort would have been subject to at least some critical scrutiny. But Canada, like the U.S., is not a healthy society. Major outlets like CNN, NPR, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation simply regurgitated the claim as a verified fact, couching their coverage in the most hyperbolic terms possible. CNN called it an “unthinkable” discovery. The Washington Post declared the story had “dragged the horror of Canada’s mistreatment of Indigenous people back into the spotlight.”
Canadian politicians followed suit. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered flags to be lowered to half-mast and demanded Pope Francis come to Canada and apologize (which he did, a year later). Trudeau said the discovery “is a painful reminder of that dark and shameful chapter of our country’s history.” British Columbia Premier John Horgan said he was “horrified and heartbroken.” The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said it was “a large scale human rights violation,” and called on Canada and the Vatican to investigate.
Canadian tribal leaders went further, saying the purported discovery was evidence of “mass murder of indigenous people,” and an “attempted genocide.” They compared the priests and nuns who ran these schools to Nazis.