Attempted cultural suicide

By Conrad Black

This column is prompted by the refusal of the Powell River newspaper, the Powell River Peak, to publish an advertisement for a talk to be given on March 30 in Powell River by Frances Widdowson, a contributor to the excellent book “Grave Error.” It was an honour to have been asked to contribute a foreword to that book, which was a carefully researched collection of learned and impartial opinions about the controversy in 2021 over the so-called unmarked graves of Indigenous children near the Kamloops Indian Residential School. The excuse given in writing by the publisher of the Peak, Kelly Keil, on March 17 for refusing to advertise this event was that “Grave Error” “appears to centre around the denial of well-documented historical facts regarding residential schools, which contradicts the overwhelming evidence provided by survivors, historical records and independent inquiries.… Our advertising standards require that we do not publish content that promotes misinformation or undermines established historical facts. This is not an issue of limiting free expression but rather of ensuring that our platform is not used to spread content that distorts history and may cause harm, particularly to Indigenous communities.… We cannot in good conscience facilitate the promotion of material it denies documented historical atrocities.“

This is a scurrilous denunciation of a book authored by experts in this field, rigorously presenting the product of meticulous and impartial inquiry and analysis. It is particularly galling hypocrisy coming from the publisher of a newspaper that jubilantly published a hagiographical description of a talk given by NDP MP Leah Gazan, the mover of a parliamentary accusation against Canada of attempted genocide against our Native people. The Kamloops children’s unmarked grave incident was reported locally and then taken up and publicized all over the world: that the corpses of 215 children who had died at a residential school had been discovered and that their deaths had not been reported and that they were surreptitiously buried in unmarked graves. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed shame and guilt on behalf of this country and ordered that Canadian government flags be lowered to half-mast and remain there for nearly six months, including on our embassies and consulates abroad.

“Grave Error” was published in 2023, edited by C.P. Champion and Thomas Flanagan, and is a collaboration between 17 people who between them are learned about all aspects of this controversy and who soberly analyze it from their different perspectives. “Grave Error” does not whitewash any wrongdoing or shortcoming, and there have been many of them, in Canada’s historic policy toward Indigenous people. It starts from the fact that the evidence that was the basis of these allegations about unmarked graves was the detection by underground radar of “anomalies.” The people who actually conducted that research were careful to say that it was far from certain what the cause of these anomalies were: they could be the roots of trees, geological phenomena or the burial of an unlimited range of objects. It was outright and unsubstantiated speculation that these were graves at all, and if they were graves, there was no reason to be confident about whose graves they were.

First published in the National Post