Frances Widdowson: Kamloops, unmarked graves and academic freedom

Frances Widdowson is a Canadian political scientist. She was an associate professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary until her dismissal in 2021. For several years she has examined the evidence behind the May 2021 announcement concerning the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. She joins Dane Giraud to set out what she has found.

In May 2021 it was announced that the remains of 215 children had been confirmed at the site. Widdowson gives her account of what followed. She describes a ground-penetrating radar survey of an apple orchard, and a July 2021 presentation in which the figure was put at 200 targets of interest rather than confirmed remains. She explains what ground radar can detect and what it cannot, and why she argues that only excavation can settle the question. She also covers the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission volume on missing children and burials, and the difference between an unmarked grave and a clandestine one.

The wider argument is about open inquiry. Widdowson says the subject has become very difficult to research in Canada, and that questioning the claim invites the label of residential school denier. Mount Royal University dismissed her in 2021. She links that dismissal to her positions on this and other contested issues, and the matter remains before the Alberta Labour Relations Board.

Her claims in this episode are her own. We publish them because the question of who is permitted to ask them is a free speech question. An argument that cannot be tested in public is not an argument at all.

Free to Speak is the official podcast of the New Zealand Free Speech Union. Uncensored conversations on free speech, civil liberties, and the people defending them. Hosted by Dane Giraud.

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Transcript

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Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to Free to Speak, the New Zealand Free Speech Union podcast. If you enjoy the show, subscribe for uncensored conversations and free speech news from New Zealand and beyond.

SPEAKER_02 0:11

Kioda and welcome to Free to Speak, the official podcast of the New Zealand Free Speech Union. My name is Dane Giroux. I am your host and a council member of the Free Speech Union. And joining me today, all the way from Alberta, Canada, is a very special guest, Francis Widowson. Now, Francis is a political scientist who was wrongly terminated from Mount Royal University, but soon to be reinstated. God willing or the courts willing? That's correct, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 0:41

That's correct.

SPEAKER_02 0:42

Yeah, uh Francis is also a documentary make on academic freedom and the Kamloops unmarked Graves uh saga. Um we we um are gonna primarily look at that today, which is it's just a very um fascinating example of um, I don't know, what would you call it, postmodernist umwokism, fabrication,

Work In Aboriginal Policy

SPEAKER_02 1:05

all of that. It's it's it's pretty nuts. Let's get a bit about your background. So you've worked uh in Aboriginal policy for many years now, haven't you? So um what took you in in into that space?

SPEAKER_00 1:18

So I uh at the University of Victoria, I was uh uh I I did a master's degree and I decided to go to the government of the Northwest Territories, which is uh highly Aboriginally oriented territory, and I worked in the government there for five years. And when I was in the in the government, I met Albert Howard, who uh was a consultant for Aboriginal groups in the Northwest Territories, and we started talking about the Aboriginal question in Canada, and as a result of that, we discovered this group uh called the Aboriginal Industry, which is a collection of lawyers and consultants. And actually, Albert was uh an innocent member of the Aboriginal industry, and through talking, we realized there was this group was trying to maintain Aboriginal people in a state of dependency to divert transfers, to divert government transfers to them. And uh, we began to expose that when we were talking about the government's traditional knowledge policy, which was attempting to incorporate the spiritual beliefs of Aboriginal people into the environmental assessment process. So that's what started my interest in that that area.

SPEAKER_02 2:37

So when you say a group, is this a formal, this isn't a formal thing, is this like just a just a collection of what lawyers and and consultants, a consultancy industry, basically, is what you're saying.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Yeah, so they don't they're not they're not colluding with one another just through self-interest. They what they do is they foment grievances. So they it's largely the legal side that does it. They start disputes largely about things like uh Aboriginal ownership of the land. In order to substantiate that, they use kinds of uh traditional cultural kinds of explanations, which results in uh sort of maintaining less developed practices or promoting them, and then diverts all this money. Like I believe in Canada it's $30 billion a year, something like this, that go into all these disputes and to go fund unviable Aboriginal communities when really what's needed is a strategy that would enable Aboriginal people to produce the goods and services that Canadians need and would allow them to become actual members of Canadian society. But that's not happening because many Aboriginal people are actually being warehoused in these unviable communities and really live terrible, terrible lives with conditions that are just absolutely appalling because these communities are not viable and Aboriginal people are just do not know how to participate in in modern society. The people that are in those communities, not Aboriginal people who are completely integrated, but that's not who uh the Aboriginal industry is largely focusing on.

SPEAKER_02 4:27

Just just billions of dollars in in legal fees and fights and consultancy and everything, and the the people on the ground living in possibly squalor, even, uh just just see nothing, see none of it.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

Exactly. And the unmarked graves as well, which we were we're gonna get into shortly. Um, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into these kinds of searches, and that goes to, of course, the archaeological consultants, and you need the lawyers to draw up all the contracts and all these things. So again, it it becomes a big Aboriginal industry kind of enterprise. Instead of that money going to provide educational improvements, housing improvements, dealing with the fetal alcohol syndrome problem, dealing with the the terrible sexual abuse problems that exist. So a lot of the problems are not being addressed, but it's just being diverted into completely unproductive and sometimes even counterproductive types of initiatives.

SPEAKER_02 5:31

Which are probably driven by a lot of guilt, aren't they? Um it can be sold and packaged pretty well.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

Um Yeah. And the genocide, the claim of genocide, that that's that's kind of driving a lot of this, that Canada is a genocidal country and therefore um, you know, reparations must be paid um for indefinitely to deal with like the genocidal actions. And then coming back to the MR Graves claim again, it it it's it's it kind of is at the the foundation of the genocide claim that all these uh clandestine burials, perhaps a mass grave or a number of mass graves have been uh located next to residential schools, which turns out not to be true.

SPEAKER_02 6:24

Yeah, well, I remember when the story broke there. So we'll start we'll start on that now. Um I I remember when the story broke there a few years ago. I was pretty horrified, obviously, as anyone would be reading it and thinking, oh man, uh at least we didn't have that here, you know. Like I was sort of thinking that way, you know, with our Maori population. Um not to say there weren't some some pretty bad things that that that went down. Um but um but uh I I think I've dipped in and out of it without you know following it too closely, but I've seen that you know there has been maybe Quillette, one of those um public you know, the one of those media sites, that there was at least a a thread in the jersey that could be tugged at and and the whole was starting to get a little bigger and bigger. You know, I I think you're one of the people tugging tugging the wall, aren't you? Um in my metaphor, my

What Residential Schools Were

SPEAKER_02 7:18

rather clever metaphor. Um so uh so I think we need to probably establish for our audience, our our local New Zealand audience, what even were the residential the residential schools and school program? Because from the the the the the small amount of research that I've done, uh a lot of these um children were placed in these schools. Were they boarding schools? Were what exactly were they? And did did the parents at the time have a choice or just set the whole scene of what these schools were before we move into the the claims that are more contemporary?

SPEAKER_00 7:54

So this is a a highly contentious area of research in Canada, and we haven't really been able to do it very academically because of it's very, very politicized, and even trying to sort of make arguments that there were some benefits to the schools and so on, that immediately gets you labeled as what's called a residential school denier, um, which uh the NDP uh party is is the New Democratic Party is trying to make uh illegal in Canada. So there's a lot of people are quite gun shy about getting into this area. But I work with a research group of about 25 people on the residential schools, and and we we have sort of a spectrum in terms of how negative or positive the residential schools are believed to be. And it started off when uh the fur trade really declined, the economy was collapsing the uh for Aboriginal livelihoods, so there was quite a lot of destitution, and Canada was making the transition from uh sort of a mercantiless furtigite economy to an industrial agricultural economy. And the thought was that Aboriginal people would need to learn the skills, the values, and the aptitudes to be able to participate in the new kind of emerging economy. And as a result of that, a system of boarding schools was set up largely based upon studies of the United States and how those boarding schools were more successful in educating Aboriginal people than having schools in the communities because of the difficulties of the hunting and gathering lifestyle for being able to bring about educational disciplines. So it was thought this would be a better model. And the system was set up, and it started off when the schools began as being quite substandard institutions because of the difficulties, the logistical difficulties, the difficulties of getting staff, um the the the you know trying to run these schools with not very many supplies, so having to get children to work to to produce things and so on. Um what period is this? Is this turn of the century? Is this the 1920s? 1870s as well.

SPEAKER_02 10:20

1870s, okay. So quite a way back. And uh sorry, carry on. Yeah, that's good.

SPEAKER_00 10:26

Yeah, so so that that there was, and then schools often were not built all that well. And then there was a report that was done in 1907 by a medical doctor whose name was Peter Bryce, who uh wrote quite a damning report on some of the schools because of their lack of ventilation and poor nutrition and so on, resulted in very high death rates for the students there from tuberculosis and other diseases. But as well, the the death rates in the Aboriginal communities were were very high too, perhaps even higher than the schools. This is a matter of extreme, you know, kind of contentious debate as well. Uh, it's clean that the government just didn't respond at all to Bryce's report and discontinued on. That's not true. The government did uh discuss the report in the House of Commons, did make some changes to the schools. Um, they didn't go as far as what Bryce thought should happen. But there's a lot of competition for resources that were happening at that time as well. There are a lot of things that needed to be done besides the Aboriginal kinds of uh educational problems. But after um the 1930s, the the government wanted to shut down the residential school system, but the Aboriginal leadership lobbied for it to be kept open because of the child welfare problems in the communities. So what would be there was no child welfare system? So how would the orphans and the neglected and the abused children, what would happen to them if there was no residential school system? At some point, uh the uh the boarding schools were the ones that were actually sought after by many Aboriginal parents because of the standard of education was higher in the residential schools than in the community schools. You had to apply to have your child sent there, unless it was a child welfare case. And there was competition uh for uh students to get into these schools.

SPEAKER_02 12:36

So this is in the 1930s.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

Yeah, as it got old, as it as it became more established.

SPEAKER_02 12:42

More established, so it's running about 50 years at that point, isn't it? I mean Yes. Yeah, and so it's it's developing and some of the problems are changing or evolving or getting better and all of that.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

Yeah, okay. And and some schools were better than you know, that's the other thing, too, is that the schools would would tend to vary depending upon the staff and how they were run. Um, so it's a it's quite a spotted history. It's not easy to have a blanket statement about it. There were some problems where the the parents and the children were were separated for quite long periods of time, resulting in a a kind of a uh like a not ability to have social cohesion in the communities. This is mentioned by many critics of the system. And then I believe the last school closed in 1996. Some of these schools were taken over by the aboriginal groups themselves and run by them. Uh that happened, I think, in starting in the 1960s. Um, but and I and I've kind of followed these debates

Kamloops Claim And Genocide Narrative

SPEAKER_00 13:46

a bit, um, but that's not really my main area of expertise. My main area of expertise is the Kamloops case, specifically because of the announcement that was made in May 27, 2021, that the remains of 215 children had been confirmed at the former Kamloops India Residential School. And as a result of that announcement, um, a kind of a hysteria took root in Canada where there was all these memorials that popped up across the country, all sorts of um, you know, sort of people being very emotional, saying that this was evidence that genocide had actually occurred in Canada when before 2021 the claim of genocide was not really very much accepted as actual genocide. People talked about cultural genocide, which is um means assimilation, that you know, languages were not allowed to be spoken and and you know, spiritual ceremonies were cracked down upon, and there was a you know sort of a coercive assimilationist approach. But most people would have said, well, stopping someone from speaking their language is not the same as intentionally trying to destroy and exterminate a group. But when Kamloops came out in 2021, the genocide claim really began to take uh take root. And so I became very interested in this claim and did was working with uh an incredible researcher by the name of Nina Green in trying to get to the bottom of what the evidence was for this claim.

SPEAKER_02 15:26

Okay. So um so you've given that's fantastic background there. So we've got the the Kamloops residential school, right? And there's a what the apple orchard close by. What made them believe that there were mass graves there initially? What what was the finding specifically that that led them to to believe that because they they didn't dig it all up, did they? No, they haven't dig it up yet. That's the interesting thing. So what exactly did they find? I mean, you know, is it's yeah, what did they find that that that led them to to pub publicize something like this um so dramatically and emphatically?

SPEAKER_00 16:09

Yeah.

From GPR Scan To “215”

SPEAKER_00 16:10

Uh so um this this issue uh has been kind of percolating since the truth and reconciliation commission uh published its report in 2015, and in that report is a ch is a volume on missing children and burials. And what's being talked about in this volume is not clandestine burials, so there was only real really one report of murder in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and that was kind of unsubstantiated and not taken seriously by the commissioners. What's being talked about is um cemeteries that originally had markers, but because the markers were wood, they deteriorated, and now there's a whole bunch of sort of abandoned cemeteries across Canada, and some of them are poorly kept up, and that's close, often close to residential schools, because the residential school often was the parish for the kind of the entire area, and burials were were were done at these schools, and and you have things like Cowasis, which is uh in Saskatchewan, where it was a cemetery for the entire community, which included a hospital, and there's no markers, there's just a couple of markers left, which are made of concrete, and everything else is no longer there, and it's you just have a basically it's a soccer field that that does have graves underneath the soccer field, but no one was really paying very much attention to this. But some some aboriginal uh people were were wanting to find out where their their their their relatives were buried in the actual cemetery, and this started a kind of a movement for to figure this out. So that that's kind of the backstory of that question.

SPEAKER_02 18:06

Okay, so could so so they're unmarked graves, and it's like, oh, my grandmother was buried in an um unmarked grave. I mean, when you hear that, that's pretty emotional and and uh and does point towards some sort of um uh neglect or or or even governmental neglect or or or nefarious behavior. But if it's just a disintegrating uh cross, wooden cross, that's a completely different framing, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 18:39

Yes. And so that was that issue, which you know, people might want to go find where their relatives are buried in a cemetery and so on. Uh that got conflated with sort of rumors which had been percolating since for about 20 years. It started actually with a United, a defrocked United Church minister, uh, whose name is Kevin Annat, who produced a documentary. Well, it's it's a highly you know contested kind of account called Unrepent in 2006 about all sorts of murders and so on that had taken place, torture chambers in the basements of schools, very outlandish tales. And so that kind of got a bit of absorbed within the the Aboriginal population. And uh one of the people testifying in unrepentant his name is Billy Coombs, and Billy Coombs was a student at the Camloosinian Residential School. He says in Unrepentant that there was these uh these kind of graves that were that were first clandestine burials, and he's the only known, the only documented eyewitness of the Kamloots case, but he was an alcoholic uh who was on the the uh Vancouver East side. He he was very, very influenced by Kevin Annett. And it could be like the satanic panic situation in the you know the 80s and the 90s, where people are, you know, they're sort of implanted memories are implanted about various things. Uh so it's not entirely. He died in, I think it was 2011, 2013. He also said that Queen Elizabeth II had abducted 10 children from the former Calusinian residential school. So he had a lot of tales that were not very plausible.

SPEAKER_02 20:40

Yeah, that I would have thought that might have been a disqualifying statement from a potential witness. But but even a single witness, I mean I mean, so you're basically he's the single witness. Is that right?

SPEAKER_00 20:54

That's correct.

SPEAKER_02 20:56

So that's that's very yeah, that's that's very tricky.

SPEAKER_00 20:59

Anyway, so this kind of idea that there might have been missing children was kind of existed within the minds of uh a woman by the name of Dina Jules, who's a powerful member of the Camloose band. She had $40,000 at her disposal to do something with because they were going to use it to renovate the tourist attraction, which had been built on top of the supposed clandestine burials. But she thought instead she'd use the $40,000 because COVID wasn't allowing that to be done, to use that to go and, as she said in the fifth estate documentary in 2022, to look to go and look for the kids. So she did that. So she got this GPR operator whose name is Sarah Bolier from the University of Fraser Valley, who's not a geoscientist, who's not someone who's well qualified to do GPR work. Sarah Beaulier came and did. Uh uh survey of the apple orchard found 215 hits on the GPR machine, and somehow this got relayed to the band as there being 215 children, some as young as three years old. That, and we don't know whether Sarah Bollier said this or whether the band heard her saying something and then interpreted it this way. Anyway, that led the band to put out a press release, which they uh this is why it's we start to think that it was a deception, because they didn't put it out right away. They embargoed it for two days while they got their friendly kind of journalists around. They then provided it as a scoop to a man by the name of James Peters, who works for a station called CFJC. He's an advocacy journalist. He's been a you know, kind of a proponent of you know labeling people denialists.

SPEAKER_02 23:06

He's inside the church.

SPEAKER_00 23:08

He's inside the church. So he did a very he just basically repeated their press release. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:21

Um, yeah. So look at the other.

SPEAKER_00 23:23

And just one more detail that's very important.

SPEAKER_02 23:25

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

Is so that that happened, and there was not um access granted very much to the band or anything. They kind of had a blackout after this was done until July 15th when Sarah Beaulier came and gave the presentation. This is the first time that the public got to sort of hear the evidence for this claim. And in this presentation, Sarah Beaulier said it was not 215 remains that have been confirmed. It was 200 targets of interest, which were anomalies, probable burial, she said. And the reason why she downgraded it from 215 to 200 is that 15 of the 215 were false positives that were due to the fact that the Simon Fraser Archaeology Department, Simon Fraser University Archaeology Department, had excavated that area. And previously, in 2002, I think, and she had been unaware that this had happened. So what she thought were 15 probable burials were actually not burials, they were previous excavations. And she said in this press conference uh where she's given this presentation that excavations would need to be done to confirm whether or not these were these probable burials were unmarked, were the graves of of children.

SPEAKER_02 24:57

Wow. Okay,

What Ground Penetrating Radar Shows

SPEAKER_02 24:58

so to get a bit technical, when you say a hit, like there were 200 or 215 initially hits. So what are they finding? Is it a radar thing? Is it? What are they what are they finding? What does it look like? I I'm just completely um ignorant of any of that. So what would make them go, ooh, you know, this is really interesting. Who what is that little discovery?

SPEAKER_00 25:26

Yeah, so I now um, because I've been working with uh my cinematographer Simon Harriga on this documentary about the Kamloops case for a number like over a year, and we worked uh uh about a year ago with a geoscientist, uh, and we did a survey. We did a survey of a grassy patch. We talked a lot about this. I've been interacting with a number of geoscientists about this, and what you do is you get these kinds of signals, and it's like a parabola, looks like a parabola, and what happens is is that it's uh it it's electro uh magnetism or it's conductivity, so it's uh it's changes in the soil, and it's um it's the difference between um density of soil, and it'll once it hits something that's a change in density, it will refract back up, and you'll get one of these parabola shapes. The more the contrast, the sharper the signal will be, and so a sharp signal can be a quite a significant change in soil density. It can be cobbles, it can be animal burrows, it can be a concrete, a piece of concrete, it can be a septic tile, and that's the one important thing about cam loops is that there was a significant area of the the survey, which was actually uh a dug, septic trenches were dug in the 1920s, and a bunch of septic tiles were for laid. So those signals there, and there's a whole bunch of them there. There's about about half the signals are in that septic field area.

SPEAKER_02 27:08

Well, well, because I mean when she said I think it was her that that that said it that you you brought it up, so correct me if I'm wrong, but um, that as young as three years old, how would you know that?

SPEAKER_00 27:24

Well, she saw the small uh when she's talking about this in the fifth estate, we don't know because she's gone dark, she won't answer any questions, she won't answer for anything that's happened, which is a huge problem.

SPEAKER_02 27:37

It's well well, it's a pro it's a problem, I I would say for her, but clearly, clearly not because that she she'd have there's still a lot of people behind us that isn't there.

SPEAKER_00 27:46

Yeah, there is, there is. Uh, and um on the fifth estate program, she was talking about that these were shallow, the burials, which indicated that it would be likely to be children. Um, I there's another episode which didn't involve Sarah Bolier, but it involved uh two archaeologists, one by the name of Terence Clark, the other Keisha Subernaut. That's in the documentary. Simon directed uh What Remains is about the Pell River situation. Anyway, Simon has an excerpt from uh Terence Clark saying to a bunch of students, a bunch of graduate students, imagine a child lying on its side in a pit. He's saying to the the students. So he does not know that he is getting them to think that those signals that he has uh obtained are is a child.

SPEAKER_02 28:42

I saw that the um documentary and and there's a scene with him in it, and they're all clutching each other and they and they're getting very emotional.

SPEAKER_00 28:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:51

And um, but they but they just don't really have any evidence, do they?

SPEAKER_00 28:57

No, they don't. And and that's the thing, is that it really doesn't tell you anything. The GPRs, and this is a matter of massive contention because some of these archaeologists are saying that it does that they can interpret it like an x-ray, so it's like a doctor taking an x-ray and doing these interpretations, but you get nothing like any of the detail you get with an x-ray off of the GPR machine. And I've heard many a number of people start arguing with me on social media telling me that you can look. Here's this thing that was done in Scandinavia where you got these signals, and they went and they dug up these signals in this Scandinavian graveyard, and here's the skeleton that they got from it's like, well, the reason why we know it's a skeleton is because you dug it up. That's the confirmation.

SPEAKER_02 29:50

Yeah, yeah, which which brings me to my next question.

Why Police Did Not Take Over

SPEAKER_02 29:56

Why, if there's a claim of uh a potential mass grave of children, yeah, why isn't law enforcement swarming all over the place saying, I'm sorry, all you guys out. This is this is for us to deal with now, and and getting in there with the with the diggers.

SPEAKER_00 30:16

And this is part of the documentary that Simon and I uh were doing too, is that we were we have all this this uh uh these emails from the RCMP that is you know kind of following their the the the the communications and the the RCMP is not acting in this case as they would with any other claim like this. They're saying we're gonna take a backseat to the band, the band is gonna be leading this, and we want to be sensitive, and we don't want to go in there and you know, with our white man's ways and and tell this Aboriginal group what it should be doing, and so on and so forth. But if it's a crime scene, which they're claiming it is, yeah, uh a number a number of aboriginal leaders have said this. Um uh Roseanne Archibald, um Casimir was saying this too, the the chief. Um, you know, there's been a bunch of Aboriginal leaders saying this. If it's a crime scene, then you know we need to have friends that go in there and we need to do proper uh investigations.

SPEAKER_02 31:19

Um I find I find it strange that that police would would I mean you know police can be woke, obviously. The UK, they're pretty they're pretty nutty. They are woke. They are woke. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But but um there's woke, and then there's we don't want to sort of step on toes with this potential mass grave. Yeah. I mean that that seems to me next level. Uh I I I and like uh a dereliction of duty like of epic proportions.

SPEAKER_00 31:51

But but the but the but but the obvious uh solution is and we've had many discussions about this on our research group, is if I tell the RCMP I think there's bodies buried in my backyard, they're gonna ask me, well, why do you what evidence do you have for that being the case? And I'm gonna say, well, I had a dream last night, and uh I was told that there are bodies in the backyard, or um, I can hear the children, and this recently happened. This was two months ago. There's this Assembly of First Nations meeting, and one of these chiefs said they knew there were graves there because the children are speaking to them about being buried in this apple orchard. So I say there's child, the children are speaking to me. I hear them, they're buried in the in my backyard. The RCMP is gonna go, well, we're not gonna go and dig up a bunch of stuff and get a whole bunch of dogs and everything out there because you just happen to have this dream or you happen to hear voices or something like that. And that and that's basically what the RCMP are doing is that they have no, there's not one parent who has said that their child never came home from the Cam Lucina residential school. So who are the children? Who are the junior children?

SPEAKER_02 33:06

Yeah, we'll get to that. No, no, no. Then that's that's a good point. And and we'll get to that one. Um, I just want to finish up on the police. Um, yeah, uh that they clearly they they would have had to have looked at some of the evidence and they're just not convinced. They could that they can claim wokeness because they don't want to throw anyone under the bus. Is that is that correct?

SPEAKER_00 33:23

Yes, they don't want to say, ah, this is just yeah, they're trying to get along. They they want to build relationships with the aboriginal community. The Aboriginal community is gonna be really mad if they start to do things which are going against what the Aboriginal leaders are saying, and so they just say, Well, we're gonna just stand back and let the band decide what they want to do. And when the band decides they want to excavate, then we're here to assist in whatever way that they want us to be doing stuff. So that's essentially where we are at that that at that at this point in time.

SPEAKER_02 33:57

But yeah, that they would have looked at the evidence and gone, we there's just not enough here for us to really do anything dramatic.

SPEAKER_00 34:04

So okay, well we're so and so one uh so that's the RCMP. The the next kind of situation is that the band said, I can't remember when they they first announced this, but uh it was probably with the Fifth Estate documentary, which

Missing Children Claims Meet Records

SPEAKER_00 34:24

happened in uh January 2022. So that was about October 2021. The 13 family heads, who are the representatives of all the the the elements, said that they had decided to exhume the children because, and of course, in order to exhume, you have to excavate. We don't know there's any children there, but they're they're assuming that there are. They've decided to exhume because they want to give those children the respect in death that they never received in life, and they should be returned to their families and so on and so forth. So we're told this in January 2022. We're told this again in May 2022, and then in June 2022, things change, and they're not sure what to do because they say that some of the elders want the children to be left in their final resting place.

SPEAKER_02 35:28

So they're completely just accepting 100% that they're there. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Now, I I saw it. Um I listened to a podcast that you did with a um indigenous host. Uh uh Nuanced is the name of the podcast, I believe. That's correct. Yep. Yeah. Um and forgive me for forgetting the the the host's name. Um Aaron P. Okay. Yeah, no. I think you guys, it was a really good podcast that you did together, and I think you did a good job. Um there was a bit of a back and forth and a debate that you had with a um uh I would say a very good point made by you that there is no there are no records of any um parents uh reporting the the loss of their children. And if the these kids are all from the same residential school, it seems highly suspicious that not one of them would have said, Where's my cat? Um now his counter-argument was that distrust, alcoholism, uh high suicide rates, depression, uh but but distrust, I think primarily is is why uh some of these Indian parents wouldn't have wanted to go to authorities. But and that's fine. There's obviously a lot of distrust, and there's been a lot of calamity within these communities. No one's disputing that, I don't think. But it still seems incredible that there would be no parent inquiring at all.

SPEAKER_00 37:18

Yeah, and and and this is so Aaron is he's a great guy. I I I think he's wonderful. I I'm a huge, I'm a huge supporter of him because he really listens. He he is trying very hard to you know sort of bridge the divide that does exist. And and he has a very non-confrontational kind of style, which works very well in certain contexts. But you know, he's obviously in a bit of a difficult position here because he's got all the aboriginal, many, many aboriginal people have completely bought into this idea, and they're not going to be easily dissuaded from this. And he's gonna have a difficult time kind of opposing this. So he's trying to figure out reasons why it is like he's trying to kind of fill in a possible reason why this might not have happened.

SPEAKER_02 38:06

I guess, and and and uh to be even more generous generous to him as well, um, you know, the this is a question that could have been barked at the computer screen by by someone watching. So, you know, he's he's putting it in front of you, you know. Yeah, which is which is good.

SPEAKER_00 38:25

But but there's a lot more uh evidence that seems to disconfirm this kind of claim. First of all, in the 1990s, this is the biggest one, there was a massive RCMP investigation into the residential schools in British Columbia, largely because of sexual abuse claims. So um, there's a man by the name of Arthur Plint. He had been at a number of schools, there were he had sexually abused children at one school, they were afraid he it would have been. So they did this massive. Now they were looking at sexual abuse mostly, but they were also looking at criminal acts more generally. They came up with and they had a person by the name of Charlene Belleux, uh, who was the liaison, who is quite an operator in her own right, and became famous recently by saying she wished that I would be dragged into the Kamloops Indian Residential School and raped so that I could understand what they had all gone through. So she has been involved in this kind of file for for decades. She was a liaison, so she's there trying to encourage everyone to go and talk to the police. So it's not like the RCMP went in there with all their, you know, kind of totalitarian methods or anything like that. They were getting her to help, and no one mentioned anything about murders at the Kamloops in your residential school. There were three um sort of allegations of murder that were made, um, and they were none of them were substantiated. And the only one that even was went further was Cooper Island, and they did some excavations and found no remains at Cooper Island. So, but Kamloops was never mentioned uh in the 1990s investigation. So, you know, the RCMP officer who we interviewed about this, whose name is J is Jerry Peters, he was saying, You we would have heard something about this if this had been going on, but there's not even a hint of it. And we have other cases like Jeanette Jules, who's a a very well very prominent uh sister of Dina Jules. She gave testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2013, made no mention of unmarked graves or uh clandestine burials or anything like that at that time. So, you know, this is really just came about after Sarah Beaulier did her GPR survey and everyone heard the name and number 215. And once they heard the 215, then everyone started having these memories of clandestine burials and all this sort of thing, which of course is a classic case of misremembering. Elizabeth Loftus, who's the expert in this area, says this is very common that especially if people are psychologically disturbed, they're they they they're wondering why they're so having all these problems, and they start hearing things about you know, you know, secret burials and murders and so on. And before you know it, they're imagining all sorts of scenarios that then become what they actually believe to be true, and and that's not being considered at all in these discussions about the Camloose case.

SPEAKER_02 41:41

So

Academic Freedom And Losing A Job

SPEAKER_02 41:42

this case I don't know if it's this case specifically, but uh I would say it would have played into it really got you in quite a lot of hot water with your um former university and and and we're hoping your your future university. Yeah, so um so how did so you you you did end up being uh terminated, correct? That's correct, yes. And and was it because of your challenge to to to this specifically, or was it just a just a mixed bag and this was just one of the one of the issues within it?

SPEAKER_00 42:24

Yeah, so there was there's I was I was taking on a whole bunch of different issues. Mount Royal in um 2020, so this was about about nine months before the Kamloods claim had declared in our academic governance body that the residential schools were genocidal. And I was really saying this is terrible, what has happened here. This will have this will not allow people to be able to dissent from this position. I also was uh sort of taking on the trans activism issue. So there was a number of different issues, but the but the unmarked graves was one of them. And at one point, um, because I was satirizing the I, and it was actually not Camloops, but it was Cowasus, because they wanted to cancel Canada Day in uh 2021 because of Cam loops and uh Cowasis. I had this satirical post that I did about this where I said that um for those of you who want to celebrate Canada Day, after hearing about the killing fields of the 751 at Cowasis, you are disgusting uh people. Why don't you why don't you uh celebrate Hitler's birthday while you're at it, you disgusting ghouls. Um so I I I was just like make I was sort of like I wasn't taking seriously. So that although that was not direct. at any individual. It was it was deemed by the Students Association to be uh showing uh what was that the phrase they said uh a tolerance for lethal behavior uh I went through an unbelievably abusive arbitration process over 30 hearing days uh eight days on the stand because the arbitrator the imperious and inept uh David Phillip Jones he never got Mount Royal to particularize the case to actually say what the case was the the the friction was due to my ideas like that that's why there was friction so when it was appealed before the Alberta Labor Relations Board the Alberta labor relations board said if Widowson was terminated the arbitrator has not his decision is not reasonable because he did not show that I was cannot be reinstated because of the harassment um it seems that a lot of these things have to do with Widowson's ideas and it's not reasonable to say that Widowson can't be reinstated because of her ideas because her ideas are protected by academic freedom.

SPEAKER_02 45:18

At the beginning of that the documentary of yours

Truth, Policy, And Closing

SPEAKER_02 45:22

that I watched um there's this young woman and she's she's asked or or starts talking about about truth and why and what she's basically saying is that the indigenous population can have its own truth and uh because of class disparity and all that kind of stuff and who is she to challenge it basically and and all this kind of thing. Now that's like a that's like a scene out of a horror movie for me.

SPEAKER_00 45:57

You know the truth is not oppressive you know that there's this kind of idea that that somehow you know trying to figure out what reality is actually can what what it actually consists of, it actually is more important for groups that are marginalized and have all these difficulties because that's the only way you're going to figure out what the cause of the problems are. And what we're seeing with the Aboriginal case and you know the unmarked graves claims are are just an example of the wider kind of problems in talking about Aboriginal policy is that because we don't understand why there's this this this this terrible deprivation and so on. We haven't been able to figure this out very well because as soon as you try to get at some of the most obvious kinds of problems you're told that you know this is very insulting and you shouldn't talk about this and this is upsetting for Aboriginal leaders to hear this and so on. You really are not able to figure out what's happening. And as a result of that we we really don't have policy which is able to improve the lives of Aboriginal people what we're seeing now with the what's the with what the Aboriginal industry has been doing over the last 50 years is we see a decline in the life expectancy of Aboriginal people this just came out in British Columbia that life expectancy has declined by five years over the last I'm not sure how many years but they they've been studying this so why is that the case? Why has life expectancy declined even though the Aboriginal industry kinds of initiated programs of land claims and self-government have um you know sort of been ratcheted up like immensely over the last thing well it's obvious that that throwing money at this problem and having more and more Aboriginal control over various programs that's not assisting Aboriginal people in terms of improving their conditions and we need to get at why that's the case. And if we're gonna accept the idea well we have our truth and the Aboriginal leadership has their truth and we can't really communicate um we're not we're never going to be able to figure that out and so that is kind of probably the the biggest trap biggest tragedy that's before us right now.

SPEAKER_01 48:27

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