Shockingly irresponsible reporting on residential school cemeteries will drive the nation’s news industry into oblivion
Journalism based on prime ministerial melodrama and assumptions continues to feed the public a toxic brew of misinformation - Plus! Fact-checking the “fact” checkers
Three years before Canadian journalism lost its mind and reputation over the manner it which it covered news about the Kamloops Indian Residential School, a plaque was unveiled at the site of 38 unmarked graves just west of Regina.
The Regina Indian Industrial School was long gone, as were markers for the young people buried in its cemetery from 1891 to 1910 when the residential school was in operation. More than 500 young people attended and three of those buried there are understood to be the offspring of one of the school’s headmasters.
It was a profound and touching scene - the culmination of years of work led by Janine Windolph, who helped bring the story to light. It’s thought some children may have been left at the school, I recall being told, because their Lakota parents feared the Americans were determined to kill them all. Certainly the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry had just given it the old college try at Wounded Knee, where on Dec. 29, 1890, hundreds of innocent women, children and men were massacred and perpetrators awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
The entire event outside Regina was handled with quiet grace and humility. The farmer upon whose property the school once stood donated the land, which was designated as a provincial historical site. Dignity was restored and a harsh story that needed telling was told - truthfully and professionally. The reporting was sensitive, mature and honest. I was among the Saskatchewan provincial government officials standing graveside and bearing witness.
That story stands in stark contrast with the explosion of shabby reporting, shameless headline-writing and irresponsible political hysteria that followed the 2021 announcement that a similar graveyard might exist on the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, which operated from 1893 to 1978. Following a scan by ground penetrating radar, the Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc band announced that 215 bodies were buried there.
Except there was no proof of that and no one asked for any. Clarifications were and continue to be issued noting that what the radar had actually shown were “anomalies’ that could be bodies. But it was too late. Assumptions had been made. The term “mass graves” was thrown around feverishly and when the Cowessess First Nation announced a preliminary finding of 751 graves without markers in the community cemetery adjacent to the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, things got completely out of hand.
Chief Cadmus Delorme tried his best to ensure the story was told accurately, but the foreign press amplified the brutal Canadian supposition errors. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gobbled it all up, fanned the flames, planted teddy bears, lowered the nation’s flags for six months and declared a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation which he then used to go surfing.
It is difficult to think of a more astonishing example of immature leadership.
Wild accusations of genocide and “concentration camps” were reported without demands for evidence. The Assembly of First Nations passed a motion recommending that the International Criminal Court investigate these as crimes against humanity, dozens of churches were torched and vandalized, Mr. Trudeau called the violence understandable and Canadian Press declared residential school graves the story of the year.
It took a full year before Terry Glavin and the National Post carefully restored some semblance of adult newsroom order and integrity with a careful analysis of what was known, unknown, alleged and suspected so that readers could draw their own conclusions.
In the time since, some sites similar to Kamloops have been found to contain no human remains at all while others such as in Saddle Lake, Alberta, have had them confirmed. Despite millions in funding, no archaeology has been done at the Kamloops site and the matter has descended into a hopeless cacophony of accusations ranging from hoax to denialism - the very antithesis of most people’s understanding of reconciliation.
It is at times like this when sturdy journalism is required. There is no room here for allyship other than to the truth. This is when journalists either behave objectively to make us better informed, more thoughtful citizens or succumb to melodramatics and turn us into acrimonious, suspicion-filled loons.
And yet, not only does mainstream media continue to dance around the issue and pretend its 2021 reporting was fine (which it most certainly was not), one of its outlets chose last week to double down on the whole catastrophe.
City News Vancouver used the anniversary of the Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc announcement to declare on X/Twitter that “May 27 marks a grim anniversary. Three years ago Monday hundreds of unmarked graves were discovered at a residential school site in Kamloops.”
That post was flagged as misinformation by X, eventually deleted and the story rewritten to remove the author’s byline and insert the word “suspected.”
Nevertheless, the organization’s original story from May 28, 2021 remains available online, uncorrected.
There you can learn:
“KAMLOOPS (NEWS 1130) — After 215 children’s bodies were found at a former residential school site in Kamloops – one expert in Indigenous studies says this may just be the beginning of uncovering a horrific history of violence experienced by Indigenous children in residential schools.
“Katherine Morton Richards is a Ph.D. candidate at Memorial University in Newfoundland, and she works on anti-colonial research in Canada, particularly about residential schools. She tells NEWS 1130 the remains found sheds (sic) more light on the countries (sic) dark history with the institutions and is a devastating constant reminder “of the intensity of colonial violence and the violence faced by Indigenous children through the residential school system.”
“It’s one thing to know about the residential school system. And it’s another thing to hear about the very real material number of children who were killed,” she says.”
Media in this country remain puzzled by the public’s plummeting trust in them.
Yet those paragraphs are riddled with the kind of assumptions young journalists were once taught to challenge and avoid: because assumptions are the Mother of all Screwups.
Trust me.
Speaking of which, a recent fact check issued by Canadian Press (CP) regarding the Online News Act caught the eye of Halifax privacy expert, law professor and lawyer David Fraser.
According to CP, “some claim the law will allow police to arrest anyone for posting hate speech online, even retroactively. This is false.”
The fact check quotes, as its sole source, an official from the Justice Department. This is problematic if one expects journalists to hold those in power accountable. Perhaps checking with experts like Mr. Fraser, Philip Palmer or Michael Geist would be more more thorough and professional, particularly as the government has a clear track record of gaslighting on other legislation such as the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11).
CP appears to have confused the non-criminal provisions of the Act (complaints to and fines imposed by the Human Rights Tribunal) with its criminal aspects.
In other words, the CP “fact check” is false. As Mr. Fraser posted on X:
“Hey, CdnPressNews, your fact check on #BillC63 needs further fact checking. It is riddled with inaccuracies and misleading statements, starting with the headline…The police can investigate and charge people for "hate speech" … including a possible penalty of life in prison at the extreme ends.
“Anybody reading this for a "fact check" will be misled on what the bill actually does.”
Which makes The Rewrite wonder who it was that requested the fact check in the first place. Who could it possibly be?
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Thanks Peter for this.
I don't think you're accepting the larger, uglier truth that ALL stories about First Nations grievances are small stories that people barely notice or remember. Yes, maybe the politicians made some speeches and flew flags at half-mast, a tempest on Parliament Hill, but if you asked 100 people on the street, not 10 could fill in any detail. It doesn't make top-10 lists of anybody's favourite issues.
If you're going to examine why journalism is distrusted, I think you have to start with networks that have to pay $700M for outright defamation with very extreme, consequential lies - and yet are very successful businesses, the more-successful for having told those exact lies to prevent audience flight to OAN and Newsmax.
SOME media are not 'trusted', if they tell the truth! There is a great demand for that British journalism, where the news organization has a very strong ideological position, stronger than their position on the facts.
Since the Iraq War, the NYT apology, the movie "Shock and Awe", I can't think of a news organization I really do trust to cover all sides. The WSJ called Colin Powell's speech that convinced nobody, "Irrefutable", in 60-point type across A1. How do I trust them?
There was as much evidence for WMDs as there was for dead kids in those schoolyards, but everybody ate it up with a spoon. Support was nearly unanimous in Canada:
https://www.readthemaple.com/20-years-ago-canadian-media-lined-up-to-call-for-war-in-iraq/
..while Gwynne Dyer was trying to wave his arms. I've trusted him, but not any of those papers, ever since. If I don't get any apologies for a @!#$ing WAR, then don't expect any for the graves-story.