Canada: The year of the graves: How the world’s media got it wrong on residential school graves

[Shiloh]

Source: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/the...-school-graves

The year of the graves: How the world’s media got it wrong on residential school graves
The coverage triggered protests, church arsons and condemnation from Canada’s bad-faith rivals, but last summer’s reporting on the country's long-acknowledged historic shame had little to do with what happened. Terry Glavin reports.
Author of the article:
Terry Glavin
Publishing date:
May 26, 2022 • 1 day ago • 24 minute read •

This is how it all began, a year ago this week: ‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada. On May 28, 2021, that’s how the New York Times headlined the first of a summer-long series of gruesome “discoveries” that precipitated a descent into paroxysms of shame, guilt and rage that swept across the country.

That first story was ostensibly about 215 children whose remains were discovered in a mass grave at the site of the long-shuttered Kamloops Indian Residential School, on the grounds of the main Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc reserve in British Columbia’s southern interior. The New York Times headline illustrates the way the story was almost universally reported.

Except that’s not what happened in Kamloops.

In the following weeks, while the term “mass graves” generally gave way to “unmarked graves,” a cascade of breaking news events purported to reveal several discoveries of what eventually added up to more than 1,300 child burials at other residential school sites across Canada. Except that’s not what happened in those places, either...

[Shiloh]

Source: https://nypost.com/2022/05/27/kamloo...ium=SocialFlow

Biggest fake news story in Canada’: Kamloops mass grave debunked by academics
By Dana Kennedy
May 27, 2022 7:20am Updated

One year ago today, the leaders of the British Columbia First Nation Band Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc announced the discovery of a mass grave of more than 200 Indigenous children detected at a residential school in British Columbia.

“We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” Rosanne Casimir, chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, said in a statement on May 27, 2021.

The band called the discovery, “Le Estcwicwéy̓” — or “the missing.”

What’s still missing, however, according to a number of Canadian academics, is proof of the remains in the ground.

Since last year’s announcement, there have been no excavations at Kamloops nor any dates set for any such work to commence. Nothing has been taken out of the ground so far, according to a Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc spokesman...

[Shiloh]

Source: https://quillette.com/2022/07/22/how...marked-graves/

A Media-Fueled Social Panic Over Unmarked Graves
Not a single body has been unearthed. But Canadians wouldn’t know it from the false information reported in The New York Times.
Jonathan Kay
Jonathan Kay
22 Jul 2022 16 min read

“The discovery of unmarked graves at a former Residential School in [the province of British Columbia] and the countrywide awakening it set off have been chosen as Canada’s news story of the year by editors in newsrooms across the country,” reported the CBC last December. It was an apt choice—though not necessarily for the reasons described by the author.

Canada’s unmarked-graves story broke on May 27th, 2021, when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation reported the existence of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data that indicated regularly spaced subterranean soil disturbances on the grounds of a former Indigenous Residential School that had operated in Kamloops, BC between 1893 and 1978. In addition, the First Nation’s leaders asserted their belief that these soil disturbances corresponded to unmarked graves of Indigenous children who’d died while attending the school.

The story became an immediate sensation in the Canadian media; and remained so for months, even after the GPR expert on whom the First Nation relied, Sarah Beaulieu, carefully noted that the radar survey results didn’t necessarily indicate the presence of graves—let alone graves that had been unmarked, graves of Indigenous people, or graves of children. Contrary to what many Canadians came to believe during that heady period, GPR survey data doesn’t yield X-ray-style images that show bodies or coffins. What it typically shows are disruptions in soil and sediment. Investigators then need to dig up the ground to determine what actually lies underneath.

But those details were swept aside during what, in retrospect, appears to have been a true nation-wide social panic. As other Indigenous groups announced that they’d be conducting their own GPR surveys, media figures confidently asserted that the original Canadian Residential-School student death-toll estimate of 3,201 would soon double or even triple. One op-ed writer went so far as to declare that “the discovery of the graves of the children in Kamloops may be Canada’s Holocaust moment.” Dramatic, tear-drenched acts of public atonement unfolded everywhere, with many July 1st Canada Day celebrations being either cancelled or transformed into opportunities for morose self-laceration.

I was one of many Canadians who initially got swept up with all of this—in large part because it seemed as if everyone in the media was speaking with one voice, including journalists I’d known and respected for many years. Looking back on the coverage, I note that headline writers mostly skipped over the technical bits about soil dislocations and such, and went straight to “bodies” and “graves.” And the stories often were interspersed with credulous recitations of dubious tales featuring live babies being thrown into furnaces or buried alive...