Kamloops Unmarked Graves, Explained

The text that follows is adapted from a September 23 speech delivered by the author in Laramie, WY, at an event hosted by the University of Wyoming chapter of Heterodox Academy.

The first thing I want to do is show you a video from 31 May 2021, featuring former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau speaking to a national television audience.

As you just heard, he spoke of “the heartbreaking news that 215 children were found buried at the former Kamloops residential school. 215 children. Think of their loving families that they were ripped away from. Think of the communities that never saw them again. Think of their hopes, their dreams, their potential…All of that was taken away.”

So, the very very short version of my presentation is that none of that was true.

A few days earlier, an Indigenous group in British Columbia claimed it had found a field full of unmarked child graves. The claim was treated as fact. As a result, my entire country—right up to its prime minister, as you just heard—became engulfed in a lengthy spasm of morbid post-colonial self-flagellation. And then, over months and years, it gradually emerged that there were no graves. But by that time, Trudeau had been thrown out of power by his own Liberal Party. And he is now dating pop-rock singer Katy Perry, the voice behind such iconic 2010-era chart-toppers as California Gurls, Teenage Dream, and Last Friday Night. The End.

But you didn’t fly me across the continent for the TikTok version of the unmarked-graves story. So let me now give you a slightly more detailed rundown on how this social panic unfolded.

And once that’s done, I’ll discuss some of the ideological and epistemological factors that lay behind it—and what the whole episode says about the intellectual climate in my country.