Samizdata

“Four Years. Zero Graves. Now What?” asks Jonathan Kay in Quillette.

“I find this story astonishing as an outsider,” a British historian told me on social media last week. “Can I just confirm what I believe to be the case: There is no proof of any burials… just GPR [ground-penetrating radar] ‘anomalies’ [that] haven’t been investigated? The 215 children are, as things stand, entirely notional?”

The answer, in a word, is yes. Of the 215 “unmarked graves” of Indigenous children that were said to have been “discovered” on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia four years ago, not a single one has actually been shown to exist.

The astonishing thing is not that a remote detection system gave a reading that suggested something dramatic which upon further investigation turned out not to be. That happens all the time, in every field from mining to astronomy. Nor was there anything astonishing about the furore or about the swarms of reporters who converged on the site. If the inconsistencies in soil density had turned out to be dead bodies rather than “old pipes, septic lines, irrigation ditches, bedrock cracks, groundwater sources, mineral deposits, buried utility lines, and landfill artefacts” it would have been a knife to the heart of Canada’s view of itself.

What is astonishing, what raises the whole Kamloops affair to the level of mass psychosis, is Official Canada’s response. No graves were found, but it decided to have the whole ‘knife to the heart of Canada’s view of itself’ jamboree anyway.

… Canadians were given the impression that these radargrams displayed unmistakable images of child graves—perhaps even skeletons of the (claimed) victims.

Reporters accompanied these reports with descriptions of unspeakable crimes, supposedly sourced to the eyewitness memories of Indigenous elders—including children woken up in the middle of the night to dig shallow graves for their murdered friends

Mr Kay charitably says that Canadian journalists did not realise how many of these tales could be traced to “a defrocked priest named Kevin Arnett—a man who’d also claimed he’d witnessed Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip personally kidnap a group of Kamloops students in 1964.” I suspect that quite a few Canadian journalists did realise it. It is not as if the former Reverend Arnett concealed his views. Unlike many of the journalists, Arnett himself was probably sincerely deluded. Like false positive errors from machines, folk who think that they have secret information about a terrible conspiracy involving someone famous are not that rare. Poor old Arnett missed a trick by only witnessing the late Queen and her consort engage in a humdrum spot of kidnapping and murder. If he had just looked a little longer he would have seen them turn into shape-shifting pan-dimensional alien lizards and would have died richer than he did.

So twelve million Canadian dollars and heaven knows how many tons of earth¹ later, the story that led Justin Trudeau to fly the flags on federal buildings at half-mast for almost six months and to hundreds of arson attacks on churches has finally been acknowledged to be a false alarm.

Just kidding over the last bit. Official Canada has not acknowledged it. They are in too deep.

As I suggested above, what made this period in Canada’s history unusual is not that the likes of Kevin Arnett – correction, “Eagle Strong Voice”² as he later preferred to be called – made bizarre claims and that Noam Chomsky believed them. It’s that the likes of the Law Society of British Columbia believed them.

Not just believed them, but made them into an official doctrine that had to be affirmed by anyone wishing to practise law in British Columbia. The second half of Jonathan Kay’s article tells a story that in its implications is at least as frightening as the hysteria and fury described in the first half. Reading it, one keeps expecting to reach the point where one of the eminent lawyers entrusted with maintaining the standards of their profession in Canada’s westernmost province will finally issue a carefully-worded statement about waiting for evidence before making accusations, or about how both sides of any case must be heard, or about any of that old lawyer stuff that they used to believe in. Four years have gone by and that point has not yet come. More to the point, judging from their behaviour none of these eminent lawyers has yet dared to say to their colleagues, “Guys, I hate to be the one to ask, but have we got a watertight case?”

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Related post: There will be no “truth and reconciliation” if an inconvenient truth is made illegal.

¹Exactly how many tons of earth remains unclear. As CayleyGraph2015 commented in response to the earlier post, for all the talk of urgent investigation, less actual digging seems to have been done than one might expect given the severity of the allegations and the millions of Canadian dollars given to the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation to investigate the site.

²The “Eagle Strong Voice” link takes you to an excellent article by Terry Glavin in the independent Canadian news website The Tyee about Arnett and his claims, including one that might have been the model for “Pizzagate”. It was written in 2008, demonstrating that Arnett was well known on the conspiracy circuit even then. Interestingly, an editor’s note was added to Glavin’s article in 2021 apologetically saying that despite Glavin’s scepticism the remains of 215 children had been detected at Kamloops residential school. I await an editor’s note to the editor’s note.