By Andrea Widburg
It was a terrible scandal: Ground penetrating radar proved that hundreds, maybe thousands, of Canadian indigenous children died…or, really, were cruelly killed…at Christian and government residential schools, and then had their bodies tossed into unmarked graves. Churches (of course) burned. Now, though, it’s becoming clear that those “graves” are not yielding up bodies.
The stories out of Canada were enough to make Justin Trudeau weep. In June 2021, the New York Times wrote a representative article about the scope of the findings:
The remains of more than 1,000 people, mostly children, have been discovered on the grounds of three former residential schools in two Canadian provinces since May.
In late June, the remains of 751 people, mainly Indigenous children, were discovered at the site of a former school in the province of Saskatchewan, a Canadian Indigenous group said.
The discovery, the largest one to date, came less than a month after the remains of 200 people, mostly children, were found in unmarked graves on the grounds of another former boarding school in British Columbia. In July, the Penelakut Tribe in British Columbia said it had uncovered about 160 undocumented and unmarked graves.
That’s horrible. No wonder the Canadian government promised millions of dollars to “search for remains.”
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It’s only when you dig a little deeper into the essay that you realize that, as of the time of its writing, no graves at all had been discovered. Instead, “ground-penetrating radar” discovered anomalies. Not bones. Anomalies.
The BBC also hid the ball, reporting about the hundreds of graves found on school properties, only to admit about halfway through the essay that the “graves” were found using “ground-penetrating radar.” This BBC story reflects the same pattern of accusation, followed by the admission that no actual bodies have been located. A Wikipedia chart reveals that all the recent “grave” findings were made using radar, not shovels.
Churches, of course, burned. And leftist politicians exploited the “narrative.”
Now, though, people are finally putting shovels to the ground, and they’re discovering…nothing:
Chief Derek Nepinak of the Minegoziibe Anishinabe said the excavation of a Catholic church on the site of a former Manitoba school found “no conclusive evidence of human remains.” The lands the church is found on have been referred to as “mass graves” by outlets in the mainstream media.
In a video on social media, Chief Nepinak said that a specialized team of archeologists that work with the police were not able to detect any “evidence of human remains” under the Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Catholic Church which is the site of a former residential school in Pine Creek.
I’m certain that children died at those schools, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the pre-antibiotic era, children died all the time, especially if they weren’t getting pasteurized milk. Nor were there vaccinations against child-killing diseases. My parents and their friends, all born in the first half of the 20th century, had scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles, mumps, and polio. Only the strong survived.
I’m also sure there was abuse. As our public school system has revealed, when adults have free reign over children, there will be sadistic and warped adults. My father never recovered from (or talked about) what happened in his well-respected Jewish orphanage in Weimar and Nazi Germany. If you don’t have parents actively looking out for their children’s well-being, bad things happen. That’s why, today, parents should home-school.
I’m willing to bet that 90% or more of those “graves” found using “ground-penetrating radar” will prove to be structural findings. But the truth doesn’t modern in a post-modern world. What mattered was that the left was able to make political hay out of the anomalies and will be sure to downplay or bury the truth (in a non-anomalous media grave, of course).