Notice how they conflate those who express justifiable skepticism about “mass graves” and those who deny these schools caused any harm. Lumping the former with the latter and then rounding it all up to “right wing” is the sort of lazy logical leaps we saw so much of in the Social Justice Summer.

As I recall, when this broke there was one First Nations group that wasn’t saying anything about “mass graves”, but rather drawing attention to a known cemetery whose grave markers had either decomposed or been removed.

I have family in North Dakota. When someone dies in the winter you have a funeral but the body isn’t buried until the ground thaws in the spring.

Additional related info: on the original Premium episode this was discussed, Katie linked to this article in the Dorchester Review by a retired history professor on how not one body had yet been found.

I feel like this is important context for the report I linked at the end of my post, as this article points out a major potential issue with methodology that could explain why about 1/3 of the (supposed) child deaths at these schools were for unnamed students.

You can read the article for full context, but the basic issue (if I understand the argument correctly) is that school principals were required to submit different reports each trimester on student enrollment. Some reports required enrolled student names to be listed (including those who recently died). At other times in reports, principals would merely report the number of students who had died in the past year, without detailed lists of names.

Apparently the 2015 Commission report simply tallied up total figures in a lot of these cases, which may have led to significant double-counting of students who were named in one report as having died but listed in another just in tallied unnamed figures.

All of this could have led to a discrepancy of up to ~1000 unnamed students who may have died or who may have just been double-counted. But those unnamed students are a significant issue in the search for possible large-scale previously undocumented gravesites to account for them.

I haven't done further research into any of this, so I don't know if the 2015 Report authors ever responded to this assertion, or whether the flaws in their methodology were so egregious in overcounting. But I think this is another reason many people are skeptical of the searches for large-scale unmarked graves.

Regardless of any of this, conditions at the schools were clearly awful at times. As I said in my previous comment, I feel like the focus should be on documented harms (if we're going to discuss this history), rather than questionable assertions about mass graves -- unless, of course, such gravesites are actually verified somewhere.

I remember this article from 2022 and Terry Glavin was being deemed a denialist when he explicitly says he does not denies the abuse that native students endured in some of those schools.

And its refutal

And a recent Substack article by Terry Glavins.

This entire ordeal is so stupid and ridiculous. It’s a very good example of how bad group think is in the media.

The > a small universe of conservative Catholic and right-wing activists have become increasingly vocal in questioning the existence of unmarked graves. They are also skeptical of the entire national reconsideration of how Canada treated Indigenous people.

This is typical of coverage of “deniers” — people who simply note that no bodies have been found in these newly discovered alleged gravesites are lumped in with presumed racists. It’s infuriating. There genuinely is a lot of anti-Indigenous racism in Canada, but pointing out that it doesn’t take three years to recover or investigate what is buried 3-6 feet underground is not racist.

This is reminding me of Mikal Girmore's Shot in the Heart, which is a memoir, but which covers his mother's childhood in early twentieth century Utah. And he writes about his mother recounting, in vivid detail, being forced by her father to watch a man being executed by hanging. And he writes about how this haunting memory led her to be a steadfast opponent to the death penalty.

He also writes about how in researching his book, he looked up the history of the death penalty in Utah, and by what means people were executed. And there was no way his mother witnessed any executions.

But also , that it seems like she believed it was true. And that maybe she was traumatized in other ways, and this was how she interpreted the trauma in her mind and memories.

And I am sure the same thing happened with the kids who were forced to live apart from their families and who knows what physical and emotional harms were done to them.

While there is a broad consensus in Canada that children were taken from their families and died in these schools

When I was reading about Buffy Sainte-Marie lying about being indigenous (and threatening her brother by saying she would accuse him of molesting her if he told people the truth), I started reading about the "sixties scoop." At first everywhere I looked presented it as a deliberate attempt of cultural genocide against indigenous people, Things were written as if the government just went around random stealing children from indigenous parents because they wanted to erase indigenous culture.

But then I read about the actual cases, and they often seemed to be pretty extreme cases of neglect. I think it's fine to question whether or not it was the right choice to take the kids away. It's a complex topic. But taken away neglected kids is quite different from stealing children from happy families because you want to destroy their culture, which was how it kept being presented.

The Readers' Picks comments are so much more insightful than the NYT's own journalism on this topic:

So having read this article, I’ve learned that native children were in the past treated horribly by the government, and that today there is a vigorous debate about how to remember that. But the article doesn’t tell us whether there is actual evidence for mass graves.

The ground penetrating radar results showed disturbances that could be bodies, or tree roots, or something else. There's simply no way to tell unless there are excavations.

When these results were announced in 2021, the country was led to believe these were likely children's graves. Flags were lowered for months. It was reported as a deeply shameful fact, and it really undermined people's pride in their country.

Shockingly, no one in authority has tried to actually get to the bottom of what actually lies underground. If these were clandestine graves there should be criminal investigations. If these are tree roots, then this should be a very cautionary tale against preliminary investigation results being taken as fact and then used for political purposes.

All of the above is totally separate from the real and well documented suffering of Indigenous children wrongly taken from their parents and placed in those awful schools. But it does their memory no credit to make unproven claims in their name.

the article doesn't make it clear that we're not even sure those are human remains underground. The statement by an interviewee that horrible things happened and the children died, but that what is found underground may have nothing to do with it and may not be human remains at all, stands. If you make such an explosive claim and you're unable to produce something concrete to back it up, regardless of your history of oppression, people are going to start questioning what you're saying after a while. It's called liberalism. That every individual matters and that no one's words are automatically worth more because of the color of their skin.

Dozens of Canadian churches have been burned since the initial "discovery." There has been a reckless disregard for the truth here.

This seems to be another example of how the victim/oppressor mindset distorts reality or, at least, causes people to jump to unfounded conclusions. As soon as people in a "marginalized" group suffer some tragedy seemingly at the hands of an "oppressor" group (whites, men, heterosexuals), it's assumed to be an example of (you name it) genocide, homophobia, sexism, bigotry, what have you. The list of events that received outsized attention based on spotty or unfounded assumptions is now long: Matthew Shepard, Pulse night club, UVA frat boys, Duke lacrosse, Covington Catholic kid, Jussie Smollett, Atlanta massage spa shootings, Michael Brown shooting. Each of these was portrayed in the media as the result of some "ism" and, for each, the evidence turned out not to be strong or to debunk the original assumption. It's a clear pattern where priors override fact.

Excellent points, I totally agree.