Riots, vandalism, toppled statues, burned churches—they were all part of the fallout in Canada last summer following news reports about the remains of children buried on the sites of Indian residential schools, which had operated across the country from the 1820s to the 1990s. Now a source of profound national shame, these government-funded boarding schools were mainly run by churches and used to assimilate some 150,000 Indigenous children over more than a century and a half. It’s well established that many of these children suffered abuse, died, or disappeared—especially following the report of a government-funded Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015—but last summer’s reports of shocking new discoveries thrust the issue to the center of Canadian media and political attention. In September, Canada marked its first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. In April, Pope Francis issued an apology for the Catholic Church’s role in the residential schools and promised to visit the country this coming summer to apologize to survivors in person.
Then, last week, the Toronto-based National Post newspaper published a 5,500-word article by the journalist Terry Glavin, laying out evidence that the media had got last summer’s story very wrong. “… not a single mass grave was discovered in Canada last year,” Glavin wrote. “The several sites of unmarked graves that captured international headlines were either already-known cemeteries, or they remain sites of speculation even now, unverified as genuine grave sites. Not a single child among the 3,201 children on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 2015 registry of residential school deaths was located in any of these places. In none of these places were any human remains unearthed.” What’s happened here?
Terry Glavin is a columnist for The National Post and The Ottawa Citizen, a contributing editor to Maclean’s magazine, and the author of the newsletter The Real Story. According to Glavin, the critical factor in the developments of the last year has been an almost total failure by the press to listen to the Indigenous people who actually knew the details of what was going on at the residential-school sites—people who have been emphasizing, for instance, that they’d not, in fact, found mass graves but “probable” burials. Instead, Glavin says, journalists have tended to advance and amplify sensational narratives about the evidence that have supported a “radical chic” view of Canada as a categorically oppressive country. While some good has come from the resulting attention and introspection, Glavin sees a bigger “crisis of public knowledge” behind them—in which narrative storytelling is overtaking fact-based reporting and a pervasive desire to believe certain ideas is overpowering people’s ability to understand their world.
Graham Vyse: What were the circumstances leading up to the reporting about newly discovered graves last year?
Terry Glavin: There was a series of events. In 2015, a report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada found that the country’s system of residential schools for Indigenous children should be understood to have imposed a form of cultural genocide. I’ve never raised any objection to that finding. In fact, I’ve argued for it.
