Re-Examining The Story Of Indigenous And Non-Indigenous Canadians

Specifically, The Lies!

Photo by Galen Crout on Unsplash

Terry Glavin’s Year Of The Graves National Post essay - which led me to write two articles on the unmarked graves issue (one published in True North, the other in The Frontier Center For Public Policy) - made a really important point. It made a few actually. But the one I felt was most important was when Terry correctly identified the overarching issue as an epistemic-crisis. How did the unmarked graves story get so out of hand? Tom Flanagan’s new piece published June 29 - The truth about Canada’s Indian graves - UnHerd - offers a compelling analysis.

How could the fake news story of unmarked graves, with its attendant legends of missing children ripped from the arms of their mothers, have gained such wide currency among political and media elites? The short answer is that it fits perfectly into the progressive narrative of white supremacy, of the white majority in Canada oppressing racial minorities. -Tom Flanagan

Tom is referring to my area of focus with regards to the Indigenous file. How the “epistemic crises” that Terry Glavin associates with the unmarked graves narrative intersects with Tom’s analysis is of particular interest to me. This epistemic crisis is characterized by obfuscation and distraction. Systemic racism, white supremacy and the oppression of colonialism and its ever-present lingering effects, are key ingredients of the narratives spun by lucrative grievance industries. Which is exactly what the unmarked graves are part of. The high levels of confusion, brought about by the sensationalized unmarked graves narrative, has shut down critical thinking by overwhelming the public with repetitions of emotionally manipulative falsehoods. But Tom Flanagan sees through it:

Fake news does not arise and thrive in a political vacuum. While progressive ideology makes academia and the Liberal government a receptive audience, the indigenous industry has an obvious financial stake in driving the story. As long as the dollars flow, expect more stories about unmarked graves, yet no excavations to test the truth of the stories.- Tom Flanagan

Follow the money. Always follow the money. Unmarked graves are worth millions. Excavation is too risky, they will avoid it at all costs. The Indigenous industry cannot take any chances that the soil disturbances detected by ground penetrating radar might be only that; soil disturbances, not clandestine graves of murdered children.

Earlier this week on The Turn I posted - Exposing Children To Sexual Content Is Not Progress (substack.com) - in which I discuss Jenifer Bilek, an artist an journalist who is doing excellent work following the money and examining what the gender identity industry (and the larger medical industrial complex) are up to with their obsession with all things LGBTQ.

Jenifer makes the point that powerful corporations don’t just get behind a civil rights movement of a tiny segment of the population (trans); while Tom Flanagan points out the motivations of the Indigenous industry.

Similar to an unmarked grave, a child wishing to transition to the opposite sex, can be exploited through the deployment of an infrastructure of products and services that have risen up entirely out of unsubstantiated stories requiring the acceptance of subjective knowings or lived experience. An unmarked grave can be exploited to extract funding for further investigation, a gender non-conforming child can be exploited by the medical industrial complex through drugs and surgeries. There is always a reason for the madness, follow the money to find out what it is.

Corrupt elites, corporatists, and the Indigenous Industry are creating new markets out of grievance and fantasy. There are billions of dollars at stake, but there is much collateral damage. The medicalizing of children (sex re-assignment surgery that results in sterilization among other complications) is a tragedy beyond words. But most of the wreckage brought on by these panicked narrative driven societal convulsions is barely noticed. How the destruction that occurred in the aftermath of the first announcement of unmarked graves discovered at an Indian Residential School (Kamloops, BC) is not a much bigger story, is beyond me: 

Sixty-eight Christian churches, mostly Roman Catholic, were vandalised or even burned to the ground. Many of these were historical church buildings still used and revered by native people. The pretext for arson and vandalism was that the Kamloops Indian Residential School had been run by a Catholic religious order, as had 43% of all residential schools. Imagine the outrage if 68 synagogues or mosques had been vandalised and burned. Yet the attacks on 68 Catholic churches passed with only mild criticism. -Tom Flanagan

When it comes to IRSs, cultural genocide (sometimes just genocide), is the heartbeat of the narrative justifying government transfers demanded by the rent-seeking Indigenous Industry. The Indigenous Industry is a grievance industry, and unmarked graves are meant to sell the claim of genocide (the most lucrative of all grievances).

Cultural genocide is an extra-legal term that describes a very natural process of cultural development that has always occurred when populations of people co-mingle. The way the term is being used currently is part of the failure in epistemology Terry Glavin identified. Smaller groups take on cultural features of dominant groups for a variety of reasons. The current reductive theories regarding colonialism see the vast collision of cultures as always being nothing more than oppressive projects of conquest and plunder. Well, scholars say there is more to it than that. 

Douglas Murray’s new book “The War On the West” provides an expanded discussion of this “epistemic crisis.” The attack on all that is associated with the enlightened liberal traditions of the West, from within the West, is the thing I believe all the grown-ups in Canada should be united in addressing.

The term cultural genocide is a concession. The Indigenous industry really wants to say genocide, because that is big money, but for now they have settled with cultural genocide. But please gentle reader, don’t believe it! It is these concessions that allow the epistemic crises to entrench. Cultural genocide is literally one word away from genocide, and neither of those things happened in Canada.

People are feeling, not thinking. The scholars able to put their feelings in perspective, who choose to prioritize dispassionate truth-seeking, are being canceled and silenced and otherwise marginalized by those who, overcome with feeling, can no longer think.

I ask the reader to open your mind, pull back with me as I (with the help of teams of researchers) examine the larger picture.

“Tom Flanagan et al” , as many of the narrative reversal articles have mentioned, is offering a compelling critique of the official line, as does Frances Widdowson. What I have learned from them and others is summarized in the “concessions” section below.

There are four enormously glaring concessions that absolutely must be addressed.

1.Early Contact & Settlement: The Developmental Gap

The only accepted version is something like this: When European settlers arrived in what is now known as Canada, they encountered an equally advanced culture who’s advancements weren’t expressed like the Europeans - in high-tech like ships and guns, but in things that are hard to explain to those who are not practitioners of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge, which is hard to explain to those who are not practitioners of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge. We need to get off this particular carousel, because it is highly condescending to the Indigenous Peoples.

The truth is, that because of a variety of factors, not limited to the environmental conditions in Europe, European societies were thousands of years ahead of the Indigenous Peoples on the scale of cultural development used by anthropologists who are not captured by postmodern assumptions rooted in cultural relativism (another part of the epistemic crisis). This is not a race based statement, it's a culturally-based statement.

The fact that there are countless examples of brilliant successful modern day Indigenous people (Tomson Highway for example), is proof that there is nothing racially inferior about the Indigenous (or any other populations of people for that matter). So why do we have to pretend that this enormous gap in cultural development at the time of contact did not exist? For many reasons, beyond the scope of today's post, this does an enormous disservice to present day efforts aimed at ameliorating Indigenous dependency.

2. Cultural Genocide

The best example I’ve heard for this is one Frances Widdowson gave where she talked about the regions in France that existed before France, that became French-speaking France. All of the people of that region took up French as their language, and older languages were lost. Frances asks why this is not considered cultural genocide.

In an email exchange I had with Barbara Kay about this topic she had the following to say:

In Mexico today, people trace their lineage back to both the Indigenous people and to Spain. The conquest there was thorough and incredibly brutal. The numbers killed were huge and the intent to kill them off was present. Yet the survivors - or their descendants anyway - have no rancour. They are assimilated and everyone’s line is by now pretty mixed, as the general attitude seems to be that what is past is past, not prologue to revenge.

Here is a piece on cultural genocide by Canadian Anthropologist Hymie Rubenstein - Cultural Genocide and the Indian Residential Schools | C2C Journal

3. Forced To Attend Residential Schools

Here is an article written by Tom Flanagan and Brian Geisbrecht regarding the misleading claim that 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend residential schools.

4. Distinction between Unmarked former cemetery graves vs. Clandestine graves (Motte & Bailey is being used to trojan horse a general feeling of genocide).

Here is a comment that Frances Widdowson made on Woke Watch Canada regarding unmarked graves:

The most important thing that needs to be stressed is that there is a difference between "unmarked" clandestine graves and "unmarked" graves in cemeteries. Although "unmarked" graves in cemeteries have been "discovered", *clandestine* graves have not. The is the infamous postmodern "motte and bailey" technique. The "motte" is unmarked graves in cemeteries (because the crosses have blown away), and the "bailey" is clandestine graves. We kept being drawn into discussions about "unmarked graves" without establishing whether what is meant is graves in cemeteries or clandestine graves.

I’ll leave it at that for today. The above summarizes some of the themes I will be writing about from my Indigenous file in the coming days and weeks. So stay tuned!

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