What Canada Can Learn from Tulsa, OK
Last Year's "Kamloops Discovery" of a mass, unmarked grave of indigenous children at a Canadian Indian residential school looks like a horrific scandal. But is it?
Western democracies have long publicly and loudly confronted dark historical episodes involving aboriginal or indigenous people. But honestly, every culture and continent need not scratch very deep to find their sordid history, from Africa to China, from ancient times to today. If they’d only admit it.
That’s no less true of the United States. Growing up in Oklahoma, we learned about the 1838 Trail of Tears involving the Cherokee Nation. They and other “civilized” tribes were forcibly relocated from ancestral lands in North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and elsewhere, to Oklahoma Indian Territory. We were taught much less about the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot and massacre until recently, when “Black Wall Street” was destroyed and many killed. We don’t exactly know how many died and rest in unmarked graves, but efforts are underway to find out, with broad public support in this largely conservative community.
Tulsa’s Republican Mayor, GT Bynum, and the city launched and led a reconciliation effort leading to the 100th anniversary of the riot last year. It included investigating, identifying, and excavating possible unmarked or mass gravesites. Those efforts continue. This is tedious, painstaking, but necessary work. After all, genuine reconciliation starts with objective truth. Not “preliminary” studies, but actual evidence leads to open closure, forgiveness, and societal progress.
Inconvenient Truths
We rightly recoil at this horrible history. In an important sense, that is why we teach and learn from history, all of it, so we don’t repeat mistakes. Erasing or rewriting history to fit narratives is counterproductive, if not evil. That also means that we don’t overly romanticize or gloss over accounts, whether the “lost cause” or those of indigenous or aboriginal people, including examples of cannibalism and human sacrifice. Example: Oklahoma’s civilized tribes before and during the Civil War (they fought for the Confederacy and enslaved Africans). The last Confederate general to surrender as the Civil War ended in 1865 wasn’t Robert E. Lee or Joseph E. Johnston. It was Cherokee Indian chieftain Stand Watie.
Australia, Russia, Ukraine, and . . . Canada
And Americans are hardly alone. Australia has long struggled with its sordid treatment of aboriginals, with reconciliation efforts beginning in earnest in 1938. Other countries have long struggled with horrible examples of genocide. Nazi Germany is the most infamous example, but not the most recent.
I’m only a little surprised that we’re not hearing more about what Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin did to Ukraine during the 1932-33 Holodomor. Perhaps we will in the coming days, with over 100,000 Russian troops poised to invade Ukraine in the coming days or weeks (Xi won’t look kindly upon Putin stepping on fawning coverage of his upcoming Winter Olympics, so there’s that). History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes, as Mark Twain said.
And then there’s Canada, which has made the most visible and recent efforts to resolve issues with their past. It largely centers on their “residential schools” system for indigenous children. When the Dominion of Canada launched in 1867, those schools were seen as meeting Canada’s commitment to educate and assimilate children into the dominant culture. Under today’s standards, that offends.
In 2008, then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a Conservative, formally apologized. An excerpt:
The treatment of children in Indian Residential Schools is a sad chapter in our history.
For more than a century, Indian Residential Schools separated over 150,000 Aboriginal children from their families and communities. In the 1870's, the federal government, partly in order to meet its obligation to educate Aboriginal children, began to play a role in the development and administration of these schools. Two primary objectives of the Residential Schools system were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture. These objectives were based on the assumption Aboriginal cultures and spiritual beliefs were inferior and unequal. Indeed, some sought, as it was infamously said, "to kill the Indian in the child". Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country.
One hundred and thirty-two federally-supported schools were located in every province and territory, except Newfoundland, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. Most schools were operated as "joint ventures" with Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian or United Churches. The Government of Canada built an educational system in which very young children were often forcibly removed from their homes, often taken far from their communities. Many were inadequately fed, clothed and housed. All were deprived of the care and nurturing of their parents, grandparents and communities. First Nations, Inuit and Métis languages and cultural practices were prohibited in these schools. Tragically, some of these children died while attending residential schools and others never returned home.
The government now recognizes that the consequences of the Indian Residential Schools policy were profoundly negative and that this policy has had a lasting and damaging impact on Aboriginal culture, heritage and language. While some former students have spoken positively about their experiences at residential schools, these stories are far overshadowed by tragic accounts of the emotional, physical and sexual abuse and neglect of helpless children, and their separation from powerless families and communities.
As the result of a 2007 legal settlement, Harper also launched an Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission. After thousands of interviews with victims, they issued their final report in 2015 with 94 recommendations. “The Liberal government's 2019 budget set aside $33.8M over three years to develop and maintain the National Residential School Student Death Register and work with parties to establish and maintain an online registry of residential school cemeteries,” reported the state-subsidized CBC.
Fast forward to 2021 and the “Kamloops Discovery” at a former residential school in British Columbia.
Spectator USA sets the backdrop.
When a young anthropologist claimed in late May 2021 that she had discovered 215 unmarked graves near the Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia, a wave of horror swept across Canada.
Local First Nations chief Roseanne Casimir said that her community had “knowledge” that Indigenous children who had died at the school were secretly buried in the nearby orchard. In the late 1990s a child’s rib was apparently found by a tourist in the area, and a tooth in a subsequent dig in the early 2000s.
The anthropologist, Sarah Beaulieu, had scanned the orchard using ground-penetrating radar. She found 215 areas showing soil disturbance that could be indicative of graves (or other excavations). Later on she revised the number down to 200 because stones, metal content and roots indicated other possible causes. However, she admitted nothing could be concluded until excavations and forensic investigation were carried out.
The reaction to the anthropologist’s report by Canada’s government, especially Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, was apoplexy. Opposition leader Erin O’Toole humbly parroted the outrage. Pope Francis expressed pain and committed to a future visit. Trudeau ordered Canadian flags lowered to half staff. He established a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. The Canadian state-subsidized press termed the discovery as its news story of the year.
Except there’s one problem. Unlike the Tulsa Race Massacre, no excavation has been conducted. No one has discovered or confirmed a single unmarked gravesite, much less a “mass grave,” suggesting genocide.
Meanwhile, at least 68 churches across Canada were burned or desecrated in apparent retribution for the “Kamloops Discovery.” While the Prime Minister condemned the church burnings, his former top aide called them “understandable.” No mention of the church burnings across Canada as part of the Canadian press’s “story of the year.”
Then comes, on January 11th, a ground-breaking and well-documented investigative report by Professor Jacques Rouillard, writing for the Dorchester Review. The professor began his account with what seemed to be an obvious question. “AFTER SEVEN MONTHS of recrimination and denunciation, where are the remains of the children buried at the Kamloops Indian Residential School?” He continues:
The UN urged Canadian authorities and the Catholic Church to conduct “thorough investigations into the discovery of a mass grave containing the remains of over 200 children” — again before a single verified body had been exhumed. Amnesty International is demanding that the persons and institutions responsible for the “remains” that had been “found” in Kamloops be prosecuted.
It was certainly ironic that China of all countries — itself probably the greatest human rights abuser in history — called for an investigation into human rights violations against the Indigenous people in Canada at the UN Human Rights Tribunal in June 2021. This demand was required just before Canadian officials read a statement to allow the UN human rights chief access into Xinjiang to investigate the unlawful detention of over one million Uyghur Muslims. Trudeau responded that Canada had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but that “China is not recognizing even that there is a problem.”
Not a single excavation has been carried out, and none are planned.
This doesn’t yet qualify as a hoax, and hopefully, it won’t. No one suggests that the anthropologist who made the initial preliminary discovery acted with political intent or malice. This bears little resemblance to the variety of politically-inspired hoaxes that the US media and Democratic partisans have foisted on Americans over the past five years. But are partisans taking advantage of it? You decide.
By the way, we had 83 American Indian boarding schools in Oklahoma (a few still exist but many have been repurposed), more than any other state. And like Canada, we’ve found unmarked graves, sans accusations of genocide or mass gravesites. Serious and thoughtful efforts, minus the politics, are being made to find the facts, with help from the US Department of the Interior. It is important to remember that our ancestors were products of a time they did not create. Canada’s first Prime Minister, John McDonald, might agree if he had the chance.
No churches have been burned in Oklahoma as a response, or in any other state.
The Kamloops discovery could still prove true. But shouldn’t government and media at least do the hard work of assembling facts and actual truth before going on an international apology tour or looking elsewhere as dozens of churches are burned or defaced?
As 68 churches may soon testify, the danger here is that there are consequences when yet unproved allegations are made and acted upon with no apparent attempt to confirm them. Worse, such events too frequently become fodder for political agendas, whether elections or calls for reparations for slavery. Or violence.
Perhaps Tulsa’s Mayor Bynum should be traveling to Ottawa to advise Prime Minister Trudeau instead of Pope Francis.
This is painful history. It seems true to many, especially those who want to believe it, but how do we know it is true. Everyone involved deserves to know and acknowledge past atrocities. But the disgraceful official and media handling of the Kamloops discovery is no less a disservice to real victims of Canada’s sorry residential school history. Not to mention 68 churches and their parishioners. Let’s hope this violence doesn’t become Canada’s next export. We have enough of our own violence, thank you very much.
To paraphrase an old saying, a lie has traveled across Canada before the truth has put its boots on.
Canada could learn a thing or two from Tulsa, Oklahoma.