The Greatest Hate Hoax of All Time? The Canadian ‘Mass Graves’ Lie Unravels

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

T he   government of Canada just quietly, but permanently,   stopped looking for “mass graves ” of Indigenous children on the campuses of that country’s residential schools.   National Review   ran   an editorial   on this topic roughly one month back. As a scholar of   hate hoaxes specifically   and of popular mass delusions more broadly, I want to add a word.

The mass-graves hysteria began when the rising anthropologist Sarah Beaulieu used ground-penetrating radar to scan the grounds of the old Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, searching for “the remains of children alleged to be buried there” in area fireside stories.

In mid-July of 2021, unexpectedly, Dr. Beaulieu essentially   announced that these bodies had been found : that hard evidence of 200 to 215 “probable burials” had been uncovered. Her employer, Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nations Chief Rosanne Casamir, was even more blunt. She stated, on May 27, 2021, that the worst old stories were true — a “discovery” of the lost bodies had been made.

The reaction was an immediate international frenzy. Handsome Bernie Sanders — a.k.a. Justin Trudeau, prime minister of Canada — took to the speaker’s podium to denounce the entire residential school era as a “ shameful . . . dark ” one in Canadian history and ordered maple-leaf flags around the nation to be   flown at half staff   for months.   The United Nations , treating the discovery at Kamloops as confirmed, called it a “large scale” violation of human rights law. International bureaucrats urged a nationwide Canadian investigation into other potential residential school mass graves.

Media around the globe, with the exception of a few bold outliers like   Spiked UK   (whose expert on Indigenous Canadian affairs was . . . me) and the   Dorchester Review , treated the Beaulieu revelations as uncontested fact. As I noted for   Spiked , the   New York Times   ran the headline — the first of many — “ Horrible History: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada .” While that header itself leaves some potential room for ambiguity, the contents of the article did not.

Times -man Ian Austen at one point wrote: “[The Native community] has found evidence of what happened to . . . its missing children: a mass grave containing 215 children on the grounds of a former residential school.” As with the nearly contemporaneous George Floyd riots, the public reaction to this kind of thing was all too predictable.   Dozens of lovely and historic Catholic churches   — the Catholic Church operated many of Canada’s residential boarding schools — were burned to the ground by white and Native terrorists.

However — especially as other “First Peoples” tribes began commissioning their own radar scans of land and   plain digs for corpses   — it became rapidly apparent that the original Kamloops find had been wildly overstated. As the eminent Canadian don Jacques Rouillard, of the University of Montreal, noted bluntly in 2022, “ not one body ” was ever actually found on the Kamloops Reserve. What Beaulieu actually turned up, it turns out, were not caskets and corpses and long bones, but simply midsized radar signatures that might “present like burials.” Sure, they might!

But, as Rouillard — a more senior academic, and quite familiar with radar — points out, those “signatures” are not proven human “remains,” but rather simply “depressions and abnormalities in the soil of an apple orchard near the school.” Theoretically, these could be caused by almost anything — large plant roots, certainly “metal or stones.” While Beaulieu obviously has a bias toward the starting thesis of her project, both scholars agree that nothing can be truly confirmed “until the site is excavated” — which will most likely never be done.

Bluntly, one big reason this will most likely never be done is that there is a roughly 0.00 percent chance that there are actually 200 dead Native kids interred on the grounds of a well-known boarding school that operated until 1978. Such things happen in the   Saw   movies, not in urban modern Canada. And, as I note in   my earlier piece   on this topic: “Kamloops Residential School is located smack-dab in the middle of both the well-known Kamloops Indian Reservation and the 100,000 person city of Kamloops in British Columbia.” Noting this himself, Dr. Rouillard asks: “Is it really credible that the remains of 200 children were buried clandestinely in a mass grave,   on the reserve itself , without any reaction from the Band Council, until last summer?”

The good doctor’s point seems especially valid given that,   according to the Canadian National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation   (NCTR) — a group hardly biased in favor of traditional residential schools — only 51 children . . . died at Kamloops Residential across virtually the entire span of its history: from the very early 1900s to 1964. Again, post–World War II Canada was hardly the U.S. Wild West: Full records exist for almost 75 percent of these deceased students, and most of the missing early-years records could likely be obtained from a state player such as the Canadian or British Columbia Vital Statistics Agency. These low figures are not surprising, given that, in a typical mid-1950s or early-1960s year, only 500-odd children attended the school.

Other hidden mass graves are as unlikely to exist as the (nonexistent) example in Kamloops. According to the NCTR, only 3,200 confirmed “deaths of children at residential schools” have been identified across, basically, all of time. Less than one-third of these children are not fully identified by name and school and — given that each of these identified deaths was by definition formally and properly reported — the reason for the existence of “nameless” cases is almost certainly “significant limitations in both the quantity and quality” of the 100-year-old education data everyone is working with, rather than foul play.

For example, a harried school principal in 1926, while certainly ensuring that any students to fall ill and die would be buried properly or sent home, might prepare an annual report that would “give a total of the number of students who had died since . . . school opened, but with no indication of the name, year, or cause of death.” To put even a figure like 3,200 total deaths in context, it should be noted that the same-year tolls from white institutions were often very comparable. Dozens of residential schools   operated from 1876 to 1997 , and they educated   more than 150,000 children   — beginning in an era when   the starting life expectancy   at birth for an American or Canadian was about 39 years.

In isolation and in retrospect, my point — far too many old-time boarding schools tolerated a hard hand from teachers and coaches, but they were not murdering their students and burying them in the fruit orchard at night — is almost obvious. But, in the still-smoldering aftermath of what recently happened in Canada, it seems a point very worth making one more time. In my professional opinion, as the author of   Hate Crime Hoax , public hysterias occur when a critical mass of citizens allow a tertiary emotion — often a potentially positive one, such as   empathy or guilt   — to overcome logic and common sense.

Our neighbors to the north, importantly, are by no means uniquely susceptible to this. To provide just one of many Stateside examples: During just the past few years, Americans seem to have decided that the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot — a legitimately ugly and long-researched matter that involved a shoot-out between black and white countrymen, the burning of part of the famous Black Wall Street, and   at least 36 deaths   (ten Caucasians, 26 blacks) — was in fact the far more dramatic “Tulsa Race Massacre.” Post-Floyd reconstructions of the incident, largely sourced from urban legends, often involve   warplanes bombing from the sky , “ more than the multiple of hundreds ” of fatalities across both sides, and in fact a hidden mass grave containing the Afro-American majority of victims.

Considering that the entire bloody incident was reviewed   in 2000   by a blue-ribbon panel involving participants representing both of the races originally involved, I would bet . . . a fair sum of money that there is   no more a “mass grave” in Tulsa   than there was in Kamloops, B.C. Events can be awful and memorable without being apocalyptic. We would all do well to remember this — and to remember that a willingness to employ one’s faculties of logic, in order to remember it, does not a bigot make.