The missing indigenous children narrative is a hoax

Indigenous writer Joseph Quesnel warns us to Handle the truth with care in an August 31 Western Standard opinion piece, a response to what he calls insensitive comments by conservatives who have described the Kamloops grave allegations as “a hoax.”

“I take issue with those who call the Kamloops allegation a hoax…. My problem with the term is two-fold. … First, the term “hoax” in common usage connotes a malicious deception. Yes, the allegations are unproven, but there is no definitive proof of malicious deception…. Those claiming to be zealous for the truth apparently don’t want to wait for all the facts to emerge so we can see the whole picture…. [Second,] This term also has an unavoidable connection to the whole residential schools issue…. Real people were hurt and abused at many of these schools.”

Quesnel’s suggestion that truth-telling zealots “don’t want to wait for all facts to emerge” ignores that since the May 27, 2021, Kamloops Indian Band announcement of “the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School” buried next to the long-shuttered institution, no facts have emerged except those debunking the Band’s assertion.

As for the “whole residential schools’ issue” Quesnel refers to, thousands of indigenous people have been emotionally “hurt and abused” by this and other inflammatory but undocumented claims that up to 25,000 missing students are buried in unmarked graves.

These two criticisms of Quesnel’s position suggest his concerns are aimed at the wrong parties, namely Brian Giesbrecht, yours truly, and other fellow travellers fed up with the promotion and acceptance of a hoax invented, embellished, and spread by indigenous activists and their supporters in academia, the mainstream media, and the political establishment that there are thousands of missing indigenous children buried in unmarked graves across the country, many of them victims of genocide. This assertion has been meticulously exposed as the biggest hoax in Canadian history in two edited volumes and several hundred essays found here, here, here, here, and here.

Still, this exposure has not prevented indigenous special-interest groups from compulsively pushing their false narrative, the latest example being the quick and shrill reaction to the July 18 federal government announcement to indigenous organizations and community leaders responsible for searching for the presumed remains of indigenous children that their funding was being capped at $500,000 per year, a six-fold decrease since such monies first became available three years before.

This funding is miniscule compared to other spending on indigenous issues totalling hundreds of billions of dollars. Meanwhile, the mainstream media continues to focus on blame and shame witch-hunts while downplaying that at least 85 Catholic churches have been set ablaze or vandalized since the 2021 fake news report of unmarked graves near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. 

This horrific hoax, aided and abetted by a legacy media dependant on government subsidies for their survival, was intended to ignite a firestorm of backlash against the Catholic Church and white European Canadians on the world stage so that the ultimate victim card of indigenous genocide could be used to set off a series of financial reparations and “land back” initiatives.

The current unmarked grave search, rooted in the unproven May 27, 2021, Kamloops Indian Band “confirmation” of unmarked graves, quickly yielded a $321 million knee-jerk reaction from the Trudeau Liberal government.

No such “confirmation” has occurred either at Kamloops or elsewhere because only site excavation can do so. Such excavation has rarely been undertaken, presumably because it has always yielded inconclusive or problematic results.

Still, this has not stopped 146 funding agreements providing more than $216.5 million to indigenous communities and organizations as of March 31, 2024, 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.”

None of these agreements required excavation to verify ground penetrating radar (GPR) results, a crude search tool that can determine only subterranean soil disturbances.

In response to the spending cuts, Kimberly Murray, the federal government’s Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites for other indigenous activists, said “We should be investing additional funding into the supports for communities, not removing them” in their search for nameless missing children no family members are desperately looking for after failing to discover their fate in provincial death records.

This is a bizarre comment coming from a leading indigenous activist who, on March 21, 2023, stated there are no missing Indian Residential School children in her testimony before the federal government’s Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples, “The children aren’t missing; they’re buried in the cemeteries. They’re missing because the families were never told where they’re buried.”

Yes, some children never came home because they were transported to hospitals and sanitoria, hence buried elsewhere, or because they were buried in an aboriginal community cemetery far from home during the dead of winter. But this doesn’t mean their families were not informed or that their deaths and interment were not correctly recorded.

Murray also noted, “We have to follow the truth where it takes us, and Canada is putting up barriers and roadblocks to following the truth and revealing the truth. And quite frankly, it’s in breach of their international obligations.”

By “international obligations,” Murray is undoubtedly referring to the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Aboriginal Peoples approved by Canada, a land and power surrender declaration overwhelmingly but hypocritically adopted by countries whose indigenous people were massacred or fully assimilated millennia ago.

Murray also ignores that the actual “barriers and roadblocks” have been erected by the indigenous leaders reluctant to unearth the soil anomalies revealed by GPR searches or even adverse to searching provincial archives where they would quickly discover the fate of children who died while registered as Indian Residential School students.

In an emailed statement to the CBC, a Crown-Indigenous Relations spokesperson said the government’s adjustments to the funding program were aimed at allowing monies to be distributed to as many community-led initiatives as possible.

But an about face on this funding reduction occurred on August 16, when it was suddenly cancelled by Gary Anandasangaree, Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, due to the intense blowback from indigenous leaders. Anandasangaree claimed there was a mistake in not being flexible enough. “Communities know best what is needed to undertake this important work on their own terms,” he said.

What this funding brouhaha reveals is hard to determine apart from the strength of indigenous lobbying and Liberal Party guilt about its inability to reverse the downtrodden status of the country’s ordinary indigenous people since gaining power in 2015.

Still, it is undoubtedly not a sign that this federal government is finally beginning to recognize that continuing to feed what even the left-wing Toronto Star has termed the Indian industry – an army of indigenous politicians, activists, hangers-on, consultants, lawyers, and accountants who are sucking hundreds of millions of dollars out of Indian Reserves and from federal government coffers – is a fool’s errand that only earns Canada’s ruling regime contempt from all sides.

As for Quesnel, that many indigenous children had a poor boarding school experience, especially those who arrived at the schools damaged by orphanhood or life in an abusive household, or that most disadvantaged aboriginals sincerely believe that “colonial settlers” committed genocide by concealing thousands of missing children in unmarked graves, doesn’t make the false residential school claims anything other than just another rent-seeking hoax.

Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology, University of Manitoba, and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.