The collapse of news media has led to a world of funhouse mirrors and national psychotic episodes - Terry Glavin

How the perpetual paternalism of the political class keeps a boot on the neck of Indigenous people

Image created by Meta AI

(Editor’s note: This is Part Two of an interview with Terry Glavin, the journalist who revealed the truth about how media and politicians fueled panic in the wake of claims of mass graves at Indian residential schools)

As veteran journalist Terry Glavin works his way through the distortions of journalism that fed the Indigenous mass graves “narrative” of the past four years, he arrives at the image of the fairground fun house mirror.

Born to Irish parents though raised in Canada from infancy, Glavin retains through familial influence and cultural heritage the spectacular gift of the people of Eire for story telling (four Nobel Prize winners for literature over the past century in a population of around four million) but also for connecting this to that, past to present, true truth to muddled event.

Describing the explosion of “white guilt” and Indigenous political pressure in the aftermath of the purported discovery of 215 children’s bodies at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, he depicts a series of self-repeating reflections that present the experience as far more historically significant than the mere failure of journos to get the story straight.

Among them is the way the perpetual paternalism of the political class toward Indigenous people lurked behind so many grotesquely false faces of tear-stained concern for the graves of “lost children” that were, the evidence to date suggests, never there to be found in the first place. A genuine victim of that stage-managed breast-beating weep-fest, he says, was Canada’s vital goal of authentic reconciliation between Indigenous aspiration and the existing social order.

“What happened completely poisoned the conversation about genuine reconciliation of the kind that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission anticipated,” Glavin says. “The discussion has turned into this terrible minefield. No one wants to go anywhere near it.”

The irony is that what began as a calling to account of Christian – primarily Catholic – churches for overreach, neglect and abuse at nationally-funded residential schools in the past two centuries has rapidly adopted the form of a pseudo-religious neo-shibboleth, he notes.

“It’s all about speech policing, heresy and banishment. You get these drones who stand up at meetings and do land acknowledgements. They can’t pronounce any of the names properly but just hope they’ll recite the catechism correctly without straying into apostasy,” he says.

The effect, he contends, is for “white” (shorthand for non-Indigenous) people to once again project through their experience and understanding a new but still deeply contorted image of Indigeneity.

“It’s a fun house mirror effect in that what we understand of Indigenous culture is reflected and reflected back and reflected again through white people and white media,” Glavin says. “I mean, Indigenous people listen to the CBC like the rest of us.”

A long-time columnist with major Canadian newspapers, a winner of numerous awards for his magazine writing, and author of three books specifically on Indigenous issues, Glavin says the eagerness of headline-hunting journalists and predatory politicians to exploit the so-called mass graves story of 2021could be merely mockable. Alas, the outcome of their failure to discern what was really being said has been horribly, painfully obscuring.

“One way of explaining why so many Indigenous people seem to believe girls at every single residential school in Canada gave birth to babies thrown into incinerators is to account for it as classic urban legend. It has all the earmarks,” he says.

Yet a deeper, more clear-eyed look leads to the disturbing prospect that the “lost child” tales are really stand-ins for the “lost adulthood” of generations. They were the parents whose children were sent to residential schools, and thereby deprived of learning how to be mothers and fathers.

“They lost their parenthood,” Glavin says. “When their children were shipped off to residential schools, they lost the learning of parenting skills, what it is like to raise a child. There’s a really interesting phrase I found somewhere that explains (mass grave stories) as ‘ceremonies of regret.’ It describes almost a pathology (that developed) in Indigenous communities from cultural dislocation, extreme poverty, racism, dispossession,” he says.

Simultaneously, those parents, those communities that were undergoing radical rapid transformation from pre-literate societies to modernity with all its blessings and toxicity, saw the need to equip their children with the means for adaptation. The relatively recent historical record shows much 20^th century “activism” around residential schools involved Indigenous parents protesting their closure, and particularly from their Catholic nature.

“Look through the record: They did not want to be torn away from their Catholic institutions, and sundered among the Protestants,” Glavin says. “They were very clear about this. But that whole period has been expunged from our memories. There’s this strange amnesia.”

Fear of being “sundered among the Protestants” was mollified by white/non-Indigenous mythical manufacture of Indigenous people as “neolithic hippies” frolicking about in some anachronistic Woodstock, an image as repulsively stereotypical as the Rousseauian “noble savage” cliché it replaced.

It was perhaps even worse, Glavin says, because it obnoxiously shoved aside, at least in popular understanding, the genuine mythologies of Indigenous people born, formed and elaborated over millennia.

“As we’re speaking, I’m looking at a three volume collected works of the classic Haida myth tellers,” he says. “It is the Bhagavad Gita. It is Beowulf. It is oral literature that is a breathtaking contribution to human civilization, to our patrimony as human beings.”

He doesn’t even try to keep the scorn from his voice in articulating what has replaced it, again in the popular mind at least, since 2021.

“We’re conflating it with half-remembered stories that some brain-damaged hippie in (Vancouver’s) Downtown Eastside told some ex-Trotskyist United Church minister to feed his appetite for anti-Catholic bigotry,” he says.

The fun house mirror derangement syndrome of the media-politico class has serious policy implications, not least being the corruption of the original intent of reconciliation itself, Glavin says. It was meant to actively revive and rebalance the historical Indigenous relationship to the Crown with a real world effect on land ownership, use, and exploitation of natural resources to provide wealth for communities. Instead, it has become another political trick for Ottawa and the provinces to slide off the hook of returning prerogatives to their rightful owners.

As with the vanishing point model of all political responsibility , what was meant to be reconciliation has been pushed down as collective guilt onto individual Canadians and as division within Indigenous jurisdictions.

“Speaking broadly about (Indigenous) political culture in Canada, which is largely a function of the federal government, you’ve got two main kinds of political polarity in many communities.

“You’ve got people with a sense of their own identity and history and law, their rights to pursue their customs and traditions in a contemporary manner. That involves, believe it or not, (Indigenous) rights to mines and oil fields. Some of them are very business-like. Some are very militant.

“And then you’ve got the Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee crowd, the American Indian Movement. They’ve always got braids, and dream catchers hanging from their rear view mirrors. They want wellness centres.

“So, if you’re the federal government, who do you want to deal with: them, or the ones who are going to meet you at sunrise on a logging road and tell the largest forest companies in the province ‘fuck you, you’re not coming through until we make an arrangement?’

“If you’re a politician, you’re going to go for the wellness centre crowd, which is why we’ve got $308 million so that Indians can rummage around in old graveyards and tell everybody how wounded and sad they are.”

Political policy, by its nature, is generally transient, of course. But in the funhouse cycle of reflection reflecting back to the reflected an altered understanding of themselves, it can almost imperceptibly embed long-lasting effects and defects. For all his vocational concern about the failed state of journalism obvious in the glib reporting of unproven “mass graves,” Glavin seems most angry – a self-description he repeats in our conversation – about the evisceration of our epistemology: the shredding of how we know what we know and therefore know it is true.

“With the collapse of news media, its professionalization, you end up creating these national psychotic episodes. Headlines around the world saying ‘The UFOs have landed; Sasquatches have been seen.’ It’s fucking mental.

“And they get explained away by this business about different conceptions of truth, which is kind of interesting in a metaphysical way. But Indigenous people actually know the difference between truth in a metaphysical sense, and day-to-day reality. They have cosmologies that have existed for thousands of years but they also know if you don’t get the difference right, you starve.”

It's the careless, patronizing caricaturing of that Indigenous knowledge that really seems to get Glavin’s Irish up.

“It’s infantilizing Indigenous people. I’d like to see a national reckoning about that.”

(Peter Stockland is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Montreal Gazette)