Nuanced. - 267. Terry Glavin: This Journalist Questioned Kamloops 215—Then They Tried to Cancel Him

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

National Post columnist and author Terry Glavin joins to examine Kamloops 215, residential schools, media accountability, denialism, reconciliation and public trust with host Aaron Pete.Send us Fan MailSupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

Terry Glaman, were you cancelled for questioning the Camloops 215 story? There were certain people who made a very, very vigorous attempt to cast me out and to declare me a heretic. What did you say? There were 1,300 children whose remains were said to have been disinterred or found or discovered at residential school sites across the country. None of that was true. Something wasn't true. Never happened. Out of curiosity, you've studied residents. schools, how would you describe them? I think I may have been the first national columnist in Canada to say that it is not unreasonable

at all to describe the residential schools, the federal residential schools project as policy of cultural genocide. I have no quarrel with it. The Globe and Mail has called the original coverage a failure of journalism, while Canada land has revisited its treatment of the story. Do you feel vindicated? Well, I felt vindicated a long time ago, I suppose. Based on everything presently known, what do you believe is beneath the Camloops orchard? Children's burials, unrelated disturbances, or something we cannot yet identify. Terry Glavin, thank you so much for being willing to join us today.

It's a privilege to have you on the show. You're much mentioned by individuals like Tara Henley and Harrison Lauman. I'm wondering if you could first briefly introduce yourself. Well, I'm this guy, you know. I'm a journalist and an author. I've been around for a long time. I have been for some time now a columnist for the National Post. Formerly, I was contributing editor in McLean's magazine, columnist with the Ottawa Citizen, briefly a columnist for the Globe and Mail, came up in the business in reporting, and I've written several books. most of my interest over the last 10 or 20 years has been international human rights, the Middle East, the Far East.

But I have written two or three books, maybe four that you could say are either set in what we used to call Indian country or address issues related to Canadian history and indigenous crown relations and so on. spent a lot of time up coast with the Gixan. My first book, actually, was about the Gixan and their cosmology and their land claims, which ended up being the leading Aboriginal title case in Canada. And then with the Chilcotan people, which is now the leading Aboriginal title case in Canada, co-authored a book with the Namaia people, the Chilcotans who won that case.

And, yeah, that's basically who I am. Were you canceled for questioning the Camloops 215 story? I was canceled for, well, I wasn't canceled. I think people, there were certain people who made a very, very vigorous attempt to cast me out and to declare me a heretic. And somebody who should be banished from the company of civilized people didn't work. Didn't work. But yeah, it was pretty rough. What happened?

Well, I wrote the, let's see. We're going to go back to 2008 now. It was a long time ago. And at the time there was this very, very unsettling crazy person. I don't mean to use uncharitable language. A defrocked United Church Minister who was really, terrorizing, I would say, indigenous communities with these horrible stories about the murder of indigenous children at residential schools, about secret graves. And he was quite popular in a certain

section of what you might call the American left, wrote a book, Noam Chomsky, the sort of popular American left-wing guy, praised the book. And it was absolute rubbish. And it was, I have to tip my hat to Jorge Barrera, the Aboriginal People's Television Network at the time. He went to work for CBC afterwards. He did a lot of work on this too. And that's my first sort of introduction to the whole residential school graves thing. And then in 2021, while I was working at McClain's, suddenly there were headlines all over the world, I mean all over the world, about a mass grave that had been unearthed in Camus. And that happened on a Thursday.

On the weekend, the Prime Minister lowered the flags on Parliament Hill. On the Monday, he ordered the lowering of all the flags across the country on all federal buildings and on all diplomatic missions around the world. On Tuesday, Chief Rose Casimir of Camloops said, you know, we never said anything about mass graves. We didn't say we found a masquerave. But it was too late. And I actually wrote the original story about this for McLean's.

And at the time, McLean's, and this is actually a big part of the story because the story that I ended up writing for the National Post that got me into so much trouble was a story about journalism. It wasn't even about residential schools, about which I really don't hold any heterodox view at all. But that story from McLean's never ran. And there were about 14 of us at the time who were kind of disappeared by McLean's. And it became something else. It's sort of like the national version of Toronto Life magazine or something now. And anyway, the National Post said, you know, Glamin, it's got to be you. You know, you co-authored a book with with the former students of St. Mary's Indian residential school.

You know, you've been around this issue for a long time. You know, on the anniversary, you've got to be the guy who says, what the hell was that all about? So I wrote a piece, and I wrote a piece about what had happened. And Kamloops, you know, was just the sort of lit the fuse. It wasn't the whole story at all. It was, you know, it was the precursor to the story. And the story in my mind was largely about politicians, liberal politicians who very explicitly said they wanted their own George Floyd moment.

You know, recalling the riots from a year earlier in the United States over the murder of George Floyd, a black man in, I guess, Minneapolis. And we got our own George Floyd moment. We got what the federal cabinet wanted. And we saw... Sorry, who said that? Who said they wanted their own George Floyd moment? Carolyn Bennett specifically referred to George Floyd. Yeah, we need our own George, George Floyd moment.

The Minister of Crown Indigenous Relations, I guess she was at the time. And, yeah, I would say that this was a national psychotic episode, really, that was incited by the Prime Minister in his cabinet. And it was an event that the mass media played a very important supporting role. I regret to say as a journalist, nothing to be proud of in that regard. And yeah, I made a lot of people angry. What did you say? Well, I simply reported that there had been no, you know, you added it up from that summer. the title of the piece was year of the graves and was about six, seven thousand words long,

still holds up. And I simply noticed that, you know, by the end of that summer, by the end of, by the time the Mohawks actually, God bless them, managed to get the flags raised again, there were 1,300 children whose remains were said to have been disinterred or found or discovered at residential school sites across the country. none of that was true. Something wasn't true. Never happened.

And that's what you wrote? Yeah. I just said, okay, you know, this was the claim and this is what actually happened. And you go through each of the places, the localities where these horrible findings were reported around the world to have occurred. And what I found interesting is that in almost every case, the local findings, the local, first nation that was, you know, on the ground involved or associated with an alleged discovery was almost invariably the most circumspect, the most cautious in their language. And it got really kind of crazy. The one I think that was absolutely probably the most bizarre was, I mean,

you're a chief of Chihuahawthel. You've got to have some sympathy, right, for, um, I guess it's Joe Pierre, who's the chief at Amach, the old St. Mary's Indian band, and it's adjacent to a nearby is the, I think it's on their reserve, actually, is the old St. Eugene's residential school. And there was a pioneer ceremony, a cemetery associated with the residential school, but it predated the residential school. They're Catholics up there. It's a church. And there was a hospital there for a time. And he wakes up one morning and he, you know, picks up the paper, so to speak, and he reads that he had discovered 182 children buried in a graveyard, some cemetery discovered adjacent to the residential school. Never happened. Simply never happened. There was, you know, St. Eugene's is now a resort and I guess a golf course that the tribe has successfully done. developed and they were doing some work around the cemetery and they inadvertently disinterred some human remains and of course you know this is upsetting for people so they said well you know stop work we've got to make sure we know where all of the all of the the burials in that cemetery are and we have to be very careful to delineate the precise boundaries of the cemetery and of course

over the years, you know, most of the crosses were wooden, so there'd been grass fires, and the crosses were gone. So they did a very, very good, meticulous job of identifying each of the burials in a very respectful and solemn fashion. And they knew the graveyard was there. There's no, they don't even know if there's any residential schools kids buried there. But yeah, waking up one morning and being told that you've discovered the remains of 100, 82 children from a residential school. I remember Sophie Pierre, I don't know if you know, Sophie respected elder going back years in BC, Tunachah tribal council, from that community, said, look, it was a graveyard.

What do you expect to find in a graveyard? So that was the kind of thing that kept happening. It happened to Shubanakadi. It happened to Penelicott. It happened at the Kamsal Hospital in, I guess that's Alberta. It happened at Mary Aval in Saskatchewan where you had, you know, broadcast around the world,

Prime Minister Trudeau kneeling at what was purported to have been the recently discovered site of a child's burial with a teddy bear in his hand and it was all very moving. It was a cemetery. It was a cemetery. And it was not a residential.

school cemetery. I mean, there was a residential school there. It's an old Indian mission. Over the generations, Métis people, Kree people, European settlers had been buried in this cemetery. And I remember Lloyd Lerrat, who's one of the elders there, you know, was asked about this. He says, yeah, we always, we knew the cemetery was there. This isn't news to us. But, you know, the media shows up with the prime minister and the story takes on a life of its own. You know, the elders they are understood what was going on. And that was something I found fascinating is that you basically had a lot of white people talking over the heads of indigenous people. And you did have some very, I would say, irresponsible indigenous leaders at the national and provincial level.

But that's what happened in, and that's what I wrote. I mean, it was the story of the year, according to Canadian press. It was one of the biggest sort of Canadian stories in the international press in years. years. The Russian disinformation press, the Pravda press, and the Chinese propaganda press, it made enormous amounts of hay over this story. It disrupted a Canadian initiative, Canadians who were involved in an initiative at the United Nations Human Rights Council to investigate the atrocities visited upon the Uyghur people in China, which has been a really serious concern of mine for a while.

And the Chinese Communist Party position was, well, who are you to talk? You know? And so that whole initiative was disrupted. And the UN was saying, you've got to investigate all these mass murders of indigenous people in Canada. It was, I mean, there was an absolute breakdown in journalism. That was my point. It was an absolute and utter collapse. of journalism that in no small measure contributed to the, and has contributed to the decline in the

public trust in legacy media in this country. And I'd just like to conclude on one thing. I'm a normal guy in terms of my opinions and my values and stuff. And I'm always sort of heartened by when I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to public opinion polling. I just really fascinated to know what people around the world and around Canada think about stuff. I'm almost always heartened by, because sometimes I worry, you know, the beats I cover, they tend to be pretty intense. And I'm always, I tend to be kind of encouraged when I read public opinion polls because I realize that I'm, I'm normal. Like, my opinions are normal.

And at the end of the day, I think when we discuss this, this, we should recall that the majority of people in Canada are not hostile to indigenous people. They're not hostile to indigenous interests. They're perfectly open-minded about questions about Aboriginal rights and title, although that's being undermined by some pretty hysterical stuff lately. And the overwhelming majority of Canadians, indigenous and non-indigenous, say, stop this, don't talk to us about these graves. No more graves, thank you. If you've got proof. If you've got evidence that there's actually a burial, by all means, we should pay very, very close attention to this. Otherwise, shut up. Don't talk to us about this anymore.

And, you know, that is kind of my opinion as well. So I'm normal. But I think that's where we're at now. I'd just like to wrap the piece on your cancellation. What was going on behind the scenes? What were some of these people trying to do to you? Oh, well. depict me as a defender of child murderers and child rapists who should be, who should not be interviewed by anybody. Because of course, after I wrote that story, it was quite a shock to people. Wait a minute. These masquerades don't exist. There was, you know, Jesse Brown's Canada land. I'm not a fan of Jesse, I have to say. He was early on one of the people who was dismissing the notion of a cultural genocide occurring in Xinjiang.

And one of his co-producers was always happy to say that it was just an affirmative action program and that there are really no huge work camps that the Uyghurs have been put into. I ended up doing an interview with Jesse. He was very hostile, and I sort of wonder whether or not I should have done it at all. But the chairman of the Canada Council,

Jesse Wenty, told Jesse he shouldn't be interviewing me at all. There were three or four different academic associations that said that, you know, that this was horrible, that this was akin to genocide denial. The co-inventor of the or the inventor of the concept of residential schools denialism described my piece, Year of the Grabs,

as a textbook case of residential schools denialism. Last year, I guess it was last year, the RCMP published a survey of threats to national security and so on. The identified residential schools denialism as a threat to social cohesion in Canada and footnoted Year of the Graves as evidence of residential schools. There's no such thing as residential schools denialism, by the way. It's a phantasm that doesn't exist. There are people associated or people who are accused of being residential schools denialists. They're not all very nice people, by the way. They don't like me very much.

Or some of them don't like me a lot. But the whole concept is a conspiracy theory. In fact, Sean Carlton, the co-inventor or inventor of this notion, has specifically described residential schools denialism as a conspiracy. It's a conspiracy to... to drive Indians back onto the reservation or to upset reconciliation in Canada and all that kind of stuff.

And I got to say, there are some people on the other side, people who are described as residential schools denialists, I won't name them, who think that the Kamloops announcement and the upset and the furor and the hysterics was all part of a plot. It was a conspiracy.

to push through the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples through the provincial legislature in British Columbia and the House of Commons in Ottawa. And those people actually do. There's a couple of them who do think, well, we should just rewrite the Constitution, get rid of Section 35, abolish the very idea of indigenous status, get rid of treaties. We're all the same now. So, you know, I mean, there's this extremism. I think this is the key thing that people should take away from this.

This entire conversation era has become poisoned, has become toxic. It's become wounding. And I've said this more than once, you know. Like I cut my teeth as a boy reporter writing about, you know, going to the reserve, you know, talking to old guys and figuring out what was going on. and there was a lot of interest in, you know, in the local indigenous communities where, you know, in the readership area of my newspaper. And I would not encourage this beat, so to speak, to any young journalist today. It's a sad and terrible thing to say, but it is so poisonous. the way we talk about the Cowichin decision.

It's really quite awful. It's quite fearful. I mean, it doesn't hurt me that much because, I don't know, I mean, I can take care of myself. I come from an Irish Catholic immigrant family. We don't get messed around with, you know. But, I mean, you know, you can imagine, eh,

some young reporter just trying to write about some stuff that might be of interest in Indian country. Might be even a happy story. But, boy, getting at those stories, you've got to wade through all of this undergrowth and, you know, crash your way through the brambles just to get at it. It's not easy. It's not pleasant. On the contrary, though, I would say it's fertile ground for somebody to start to lead the conversation. Oh, goodness.

Yes, yes. And if you're willing to take the arrows and the tomatoes as you've experienced, there comes a credibility with who you are as a person that you're willing to kind of wade into difficult waters and try and do so thoughtfully. But I guess I would just be interested to follow up because I'd be curious as to where you think Sean Carlton specifically and Pam Palmer,

are alongside him? Where are they coming from? Because they hate me. They think I'm platforming people. You and me, Bill's, buddy? Yeah, I'm a malicious person. I'm just trying to get my community out of poverty and I'm doing my best to look at reality as it shows itself to me. And I never want to be intellectually dishonest and claim ground that doesn't exist or build something like reconciliation, which is a government policy that taxpayers pay into on grounds that aren't true on inaccurate information.

Because I think that hurts us in the long run and creates this space for conspiracy if we don't act honestly. and in good faith. We, First Nations people, asked for truth and reconciliation. We cannot now say we don't want to seek truth. And I see, I just interviewed the Attorney General of BC, Nikki Sharma,

who's talked about criminalizing Indian residential school denialism. And I was like, am I, am I on your list? Because I'm speaking with Francis Woodhosen. I've spoken to Tim Tealman. I've spoken to Nigel Begar.

Like, I've spoken to these people and they put forward their arguments. And I'm open to. hearing those. Like, what is the goal here? So what do you think the driving force behind individuals like Sean Carleton and Pam Palmyder are? There is a, okay, I think, and I wrote this in my, this is an opinion I have in my piece on Year of the Graves. It's kind of an opinion, I suppose, it's an analysis, is that we, the, the Anglo sphere, for sure, to a broader extent, sort of the Western world, if you like, is undergoing what you might.

be what has been described as a crisis of epistemology. Epistemology is the study of how societies go about the business of determining what the truth is. And we have 300 years of enlightenment experience and institutions in figuring out what the truth is. And if you're a journalist, you don't usually have to carry around, you know, five dollar words like epistemology in your pocket. You know, arriving at the truth.

truth is a fairly straightforward or very rigorous bit of business that based on the proposition the truth is comprised of facts and facts are discernible and verifiable according to a certain methodology that's been tested and tried for decades and decades. I came up in the old guild system, you know, six years an apprentice and then you're a journeyman reporter. and the conventions of journalism very, very, very, it was a trade and it had strict rules. It was very, very rigorous. And, you know, whether it's in the field of medicine or law or historiography or, you know, in any of the social sciences and humanities, that whole notion of how you go about the disciplines and the rigor and the methods required

to determine what the truth is have been completely deconstructed in many, many, many fields. It is convenient to politicians, I think. You look to the United States and you have this strange post-truth environment. in which the president of the United States can say whatever he likes and it doesn't have to be true. His followers will believe it or support it. In the case of people like Carlson and Palmitter, they really are, I think, functions of a thing called, there was the Frankfurt School. Long story short, when Marxists realized that working people were not about to overthrow capitalism and, you know, seized them. of production and, you know, these sort of theories and ideas were developed about hegemony and

ideology. And the mutation of that school over time sort of replaced ordinary working people with, you know, kind of a rainbow coalition of oppressed subalterns and third worldism has a hell have a lot to do with it. And so you find it's very, very interesting in Canada, the loudest voices on the proposition that, you know, residential schools were an exercise in genocide and that Canada as an irredeemably racist colonial genocide state are exactly the same people after October 7th, three years ago who emerged, you know, screaming and shouting in the streets about Israel, Israel being a racist, colonial, genocidal state. They're the same people.

So it's the same kind of mindset. And indeed, Sean Carlton has been part of that as well. So, I mean, he can explain himself. I don't, you know, it's like, personally, I think the guy's a nut. But that's my personal opinion. It's just that his allegations never hold up. And he's, he's an obsessive. and I think he's dishonest.

I won't call him an academic fraud because I think that would be libelous. And besides, when you look at the standards of so many of the social sciences and humanities faculties today, fraud is relative. I guess I would just follow up because, like, I believe in putting yourself in somebody else's shoes so you can see their perspective. And I have a real challenge with that with Sean Carlton and Pam Paul. because one, they won't speak to me. And even so like if I put myself in their shoes, I would go, okay, we've got this First Nation's chief, he's wrong and he needs to be corrected. Why wouldn't they want to talk to me off the record?

Why wouldn't they want to connect with me? Why wouldn't they want to do an interview and pitch their argument to me? Well, you frighten them. Understand. I would say it's probably because you frighten them. I don't, like, but I'm not that intimidating. Like, I just ask what thing is. I would let them lay out their argument without stopping them, without, like, arguing with them.

Like, I just want to hear them lay out, define denialism. And then I just have a few questions. Like, how can it be denialism? If people are just asking questions about the Kamloops case, how is that them denying the other 150 years of history? How does that come together? Why are you trying to make it sound like Holocaust denial? Why are you trying to create those similarities intentionally? Like, I would just have questions like that.

It wouldn't be like a hostile interview. I just genuinely want to understand how they see the world because it's so different than how I see it. You know, I think they're frightened of you because I don't think anyone's actually asking those kinds of questions before. And I think they know very well that they would not be able to defend the claims they make. Right. They would be, you know, particularly, I think in the case of Mr. Carlton would be quite, you know, I mean, he's got, he's on, you know, in the role. of half the CBC reporters in this country, and he shows up in all the sort of fashionable places. But nobody actually questions him seriously about this stuff.

You know, he'll save it. Well, we don't really mean that they're denying the existence of residential schools, but they're downplaying the impact of residential schools on indigenous communities. Well, you know, it's kind of hard not to downplay the impact of residential schools on indigenous communities, if you deny that it is proper or right or decent to compare the St. Mary's Indian residential school or the Camelope's Indian residential school with Auschwitz and Sobibor. Okay? Now, I'm not going to have that. There is a line where I actually, I think I'm entitled to an opinion. And I think I am entitled to the justifiable.

opinion, that that is an obscenity, an absolute obscenity to equate what we all know was for so many indigenous people that was really trying and draining an emotionally destructive experience in residential schools with the death camps. I'm sorry, no, we're not going to, I'm not going to put up of that. I won't tolerate it. And as I say, it is a conspiracy theory. And it's not, you know, it has gone right to the sort of liberal establishment. I don't mean to be partisan about this.

But, you know, Kimberly Murray's reports, I mean, my God, you read that stuff. And it is, apart from the evidence tampering that occurs in it. and the absolutely extraordinary claims that she presents in it. It is kind of, you know, textbook, anti-imperialists, settler colonialism, genocidal racist state stuff. And it's very, it's very actually weak sauce at that. and I don't think these people get challenged. They don't get people asking them honest, curious questions, like of the kind that you prefer to ask people in good faith.

So that would be my answer to your question. That's why they don't like you. That's why they're scared of you. Interesting. Out of curiosity, you've studied residential schools, how would you describe them? Because obviously we have a portion of society that are kind of going, residential schools, they weren't so bad. And I've had comments in my YouTube section going like, come on, just give us one example of how they were good. And you get people who just

kind of want to like push it to a little bit more of a middle ground. And then you have more people who are extreme who said, this was all done with the best of intent and to benefit people. Where do you land on the spectrum of opinions? Well, I think I may have been the first national columnist in Canada to say that it is not unreasonable at all to describe the residential schools, the federal residential schools project as a policy of cultural genocide. I have no quarrel with it. I do have won a little quarrel with it in that, and it's a paradox.

And it's that, you know, the actual evidence, the more striking evidence, that there was a kind of an intent with respect to cultural genocide, that in those instances, the motive was actually to prevent the physical extinction of indigenous peoples. I'm talking about on the prairies, right, primarily. So, I mean, I think cultural genocide, if you want, okay, I'm not going to call with that at all. I just don't know that it's a very helpful way to understand a very, very complicated experience that changed over time. Between the 1920s and the 1950s, I think when the federal government actually did go about the business of removing children from their communities for the purpose of kind of turning them into little white people. You know, it's hard. Cultural genocide, fine. I'm not going to get, you know, I'm not going to get worked up either on.

It's an interesting sort of academic debate. I don't know that it's very helpful for ordinary people who are trying to understand the experience because it immediately sets up a whole bunch of taboos around that you're not allowed to trespass upon. And the other thing is that the reality is, I mean, when I would, I was asked to write that book in collaboration with the former students of St. Mary's Indian residential school. I was asked by Chief Bill Williams. It was a great guy.

Calhitz, I guess. Anyway, he was head of the Indian Friendship Center in Mission at the time. And they'd done some preliminary work and sort of recording people's reminiscences and so on. He was actually angry with the way a lot of white people, shall we say, were talking about St. Mary's. You're saying it wasn't like some concentration camp, for God's sake. It was complicated. And I said to him, I remember saying to him, because I had a pretty dim view of residential schools at the time, very generally. My friend Cyril Pierre, Ketze, an elder, who had become known, I think, in the broader Stollo community as, a very, very sober, stern sort of voice on the matter of the residential schools.

I think I first went to look and fishing with Cyril when I was like 20 or something. So I knew him for a long time. And I said, you know, I told Chief Williams, Cyril is going to be my lodestar here. You know, I will meet with a whole bunch of different people and I will put something together. but, you know, I'm going to be doing this with Cyril, right, to make sure that, you know, I wasn't glossing over anything. And I always had a kind of a load star, some of to bounce ideas off. And I was also really fascinated with the history of the obelates of Mary Immaculate. It didn't want an astonishing history.

The people who ended up running the St. Mary's Indian. Indian residential schools, school amongst others, they were chased out of the United States after the Oregon Treaty of 1846 when British Columbia lost the southern half of British Columbia and the border was drawn at the 49th parallel. The obelates were, their missions were burned down by the U.S. Calgary for allegedly siding with the tribes in, you know, the Yakima War and the Nisqually War and so on. they were a really interesting bunch of people. And the early days of St. Mary is interesting.

The controversy there is that they refused to strap the kids. They wouldn't do corporal punishment. So, I mean, it was all of this weird stuff that the whole, this is the other thing I think, is really the most damaging, I would say, aspect of this dysfunctional conversation about residential schools is you can't get through it. You can't get past it to what's on the other side. The amazing history of indigenous people in this part of the world, I would say particularly most populous in the Stollo area, the broader coast-sailish area, most populous center of human

habitation in North America, north of the valley of Mexico, and west of the Mississippi, the indigenous oral tradition, the stories, the rich oral literature of the people, the peculiar experiences that those indigenous people had with the first white people. And their comprehension of Christianity and Catholicism and how a syncretic form of Catholicism had emerged here before the missionaries or even arrived. You know, if you do a proper history of Catholicism in lower, you know, the southern half of British Columbia,

there were prophets. There were Christian prophets. And they were all indigenous. There was a really interesting. thing going on there. Really interesting complex. And then, you know, I mean, just the history of the participation of indigenous people in the early emerging sort of European influenced economies, the Hudson's Bay Company, like a third of the Hudson's Bay Company workforce west of the Rocky Mountains were Hawaiians. And in Peter C. Newman's sweeping history of

the Hudson's Bay Company, the United States, the United States. They don't even get a footnote. And then you had, you know, the seal, the first seal industry. It was almost entirely a co-sailish affair, really huge sealing schooners. And they hunted seals as far as the sea of Akatsk. And they overwintered in Yokohama. I mean, there's all of this fascinating history and the contributions that indigenous people made in building the society,

that ended up being British Columbia, all of that stuff, you can't get anywhere near it. You can't get anywhere near it for two reasons. You've got to walk through all the residential school stuff in order to get anywhere near it. You have to construct this notion of indigenous people as these sort of meek children of the forest that were brutally acted upon

rather than robust, tough guy participants in a lot of this stuff. And it punches a hole in this, sort of narrative paradigm that unites Pam Palmetter, Sean Carlton, Justin Trudeau, Mark Miller, and a lot of other people, and much of the bureaucracy, which is that indigenous people were acted upon and that they are victims and that they need healing. Now, maybe it's because of the company I keep here. And coming up, you know, as a journalist and just as a guy, you know, the indigenous friends and neighbors and even distant relatives.

What I always like to say about that period, before the sort of postmodern post-truth environment took over the conversation, was it took a lot more than some white guy wearing a Walmart war bonnet at Coachella to hurt their feelings. They were tough guys. They shut down half of this province, for God's sake. Railroad blockades, you know, logging road blockades. They, you know, they came from these little reserve communities.

And they said, no, this isn't right. We need to stop the wealth leaving our territories. We need to talk to the local fishermen, local sawmill workers. We need to stop this from happening. They were tough guys. And, you know, at the height of that act, activism, which was pretty spooky for a lot of people, the public opinion poll showed that most British Columbians actually supported the indigenous position on the question of Aboriginal

title. You know, rather than cast white people as these, you know, racists and, you know, the enemies of these poor indigenous people whose feelings can't be hurt, we have to protect, to the point of sending anybody to, who disagrees with us to jail for two. years. You know, it was a very robust movement. You're familiar. You would be familiar with it yourself in Stolo Country, the fishing rights struggles

that your people went through. My God, this was not for the faint of heart. And so, you know, there's just this rich pageantry of story and history, I think, that we're almost, it's almost impossible for us to. to get our heads around the fact that this actually occurred. One last thing, I was talking to a publisher two weeks ago in Toronto. He'd phoned me up. I'd written this piece about British Columbia's history and James Douglas,

the Octoroon, as they used to call him, governor of the colony and his wife who was an Irish Cree woman, Lady Amelia, and this polyglot society that it was emerging in British Columbia. and he said, well, why don't we know? And it was the struggle against slavery, too, which was hugely important to this, you know, during the American Civil War. And, you know, they were pushing up into across the West. And I said, well, you know, the residential schools thing is a lot. It's like the only thing you're allowed to talk about.

It's really hard to push through all that stuff in order to get at these stories. And he said, well, you can't exactly push through it. I mean, you know, there were 215 children who were discharacterial. discovered buried at Camloops Indian residential school. And then I went, oh my God, where do I, where does one begin? Where do you start? So I don't think I'm going to write any book for that guy. But it's, yeah, no, it is.

It has been, I think, extremely damaging to reconciliation. I think it's been extremely damaging to relationships between ordinary people who are both indigenous and non-indigenous, whose opinions on these subjects actually. are not that much different. The only place where they get an airing, I'd say, is places like nuanced. So well done. Thank you. Just following on that same line, you wrote a book based on testimony from survivors of St. Mary's Indian residential school, which my grandmother attended.

What did those survivors teach you about respecting testimony while still verifying factual claims? I think the main thing, and after Camelps, by the way, it was updated. There was more, the elders got together and said, we need to republish this book. And there was some other testimonies that they wanted to get in there. So I thought that was pretty cool. I think the main thing is curiosity, you know, and generosity and sympathy and sympathy and understanding. You know, when you can get people who had complete. different kinds of experiences at St. Mary's. I mean radically different experiences.

Can you share some of those just to help us understand the differences? Yeah, to just talk about them and to appreciate that there can be such things as significant differences in individual experiences and to respect that. You know, and a lot of it, it's a difficult. It's a difficult thing to talk about, a very difficult thing to talk about, because it involves what, you know, the term we use now is spirituality. And there is a very profound spiritual, very deep, spiritual component to this. I don't think it's unique to what we might call Catholic Indians, but there is, there are reasons why Catholicism so easily took root. There are reasons why a syncretic Catholicism emerged that was kind of like the old smithla, secret society, the spirit dance, you know, and it was kind of like Catholic devotions that white people would know. But it was lively and it was beautiful and it was deep and it was indigenous or indigenous. And so that aspect of it, I think, is very, very, very, very powerful, very warm, very welcoming. But I think, you know, you can get it wrong.

I think that's the thing. You know, if you try to impose a narrative paradigm on top of it, you can get it wrong. I think what, it's curious, I think. Have you been in the big house, obviously? Yes. Yeah. Do you find it curious that one of the most important institutions of Co-Sailer Society, you know, the big house or the smokehouse people will call it,

you basically, you know, it's not like you're not allowed to talk about it. Exactly. But it's like you just leave it alone. Don't like, I've been to a big house and it's like, okay, you can take notes for yourself if you want, but, you know, don't write about it. You know, you sit over there with those guys and don't eat too much salmon. and careful when you drive on the way home. Those institutions that are not subjected to scrutiny

and are not pulled into acts of performance and are not problematized in the context of, you know, overburdened theories about indigenous, non-indigenous relationships or colonialism, those are the institutions that seem to hang on and survive in a really healthy kind of way. So I find that curious. That's something I learned a lot.

I took a big lesson from that. What were some of the challenges people faced at residential school that stand up to you? I think the main one is, as you might imagine, being pulled out of your community and put in this big institution and you don't get to see your folks for weeks or months on end, that is really scary, really, really, really scary. And it is damaging.

I mean, it all depends. I know that there was one study that seemed to suggest that language retention among indigenous people between the 50s and the 70s was greater among residential schools graduates than otherwise, right? I don't know what that means. I don't know why that would be. The other thing is that I think the wounding, and it's an idea I have, and I'm not,

I don't know if I'm right about this, but Catholics are weird, right? I was raised Catholic, I can say this. Protestants are great, you know, they have their own ideas and everything is symbolic and metaphorical to Protestants. It's all kind of intellectual, but Catholics know it's real. Christ is president in the mass and all this kind of stuff. But it is real.

There's a certain way of appreciating spirituality that is very objective in Catholicism and also the role of the priest. My God, I mean, he's not just some guy who makes a speech on Sundays. leads a sing-song. This guy has the power of administering the sacraments of the mass. This guy hears your confession. He knows your deepest thoughts. He knows your sins.

And when the trust in a priest is violated, this is the psychic damage that this will cause is almost indescribable. That's the other thing I think that's important to remember about all of this. And I don't want to say this is the common experience with indigenous people, but nonetheless. Robert Jago said you were not a residential school denier, but argued that your article omitted important context about some of these cases, including Tchaam Loops. What do you think he got right in his criticism?

Well, I can't say that he did because his main complaint was that I failed to report that Chief Rose Casimir intended to and was going to exume those graves. Okay. I talked to Rose Casimir. Like I think before, it was after year of the graves and then before Robert said these things, there is no, there. There was no plan then four or five years ago, and there isn't now. So I'm sorry. I've been kind of exonerated, right? And I think Robert bless his heart. I mean, there's family stuff involved. Okay?

And I think that might have influenced some things, you know, an attitude. I think Robert was actually taken advantage of by Jesse. I think he exploited Robert. I don't have any quarrel with him. We'd always have gotten along like fine. He's a very interesting guy. And unfortunately for Robert, I think, that his criticism has not held up because events as I described them and the intentions of the Cameloup's leadership have been borne out. What's going on from your perspective with the community?

I think I saw a report that could be Roseanne Kazimir said it'll take maybe 100 years for us to get around to excavate in and confirming the remains. As you may know, there are other reporters like Blacklocks who are trying to get the records of what's being submitted and the information being to the federal government. And they seem to not want to share publicly what's being committed. communicated between the two parties. Are they just stuck? Like some will argue, they're just stuck in an impossible position. They feel like they're standing on a fault line. So if they come out, do the excavation and find out there's nothing there, then denialism

will run rampant. And so the position is argued that they're not wanting to excavate because this is vulnerability, a chink in the armor. And if they excavate, they're in a bad situation. But people say, then they're guilty of what people are accusing them of, of being dishonest and not being upfront. And that the longer this drags on, the bigger the issue becomes, the more clouds hang over our head, the harder to push through this issue. And then I believe, and I hope I'm not mischaracterizing, I believe Francis believes they knew from the outset and that

their previous chief was aware that this was a bold claim that was going to have some results to it. That's what she, I think, intimated to me in our conversation, but I don't want to misquote her, that they know and that people are continuing to talk and behave like that there are confirmed remains there, that the local university is still making those claims, that they're still acting like this is all the case. And so that if they weren't guilty then, then they're definitely guilty now of being dishonest. What are your thoughts on where the nation is and what's going on here? Well, I tend to be a pretty forgiving guy.

I think this may be one of my faults. Try to put yourself in her shoes, right? like let's just say that and I think a very strong case can be made I think the evidence is pretty clear on this that Rose Casimir was at the center of this little dust storm this little hurricane and got kind of swept up in what she was being told by this committee of knowledge keepers as they are called in the community very powerful committee

and you know what band politics can be like and she kind of had to say what was being expected of her right meanwhile she has this and I won't name her but a very high price

public relations animator of the whole event and then she's got Tanya Talaga from the Globe and Mail who's there days before the announcement was

made. Tanya's acting as some kind of an interlocutor between the globe and the prime minister's office and Murray Sinclair. And it was really weird. And I think they said things that they shouldn't have said. And I mean, if you read the press release, it's kind of weird sort of new age language. Like, what the hell? You know, are we dealing with a discovery that you've made or not?

You know, what's all this stuff about knowings? And what do you mean a child as young as three years old? who is this child? And then the next thing, you know, it's an international story, right? And it's like, holy cow, and the flags are lowered on Parliament Hill. What are you going to do? Are you going to come out and say, actually, I think we may have been wrong about this? You know, that's tough.

That's tough. A lot of people, I think, have vested their entire careers. and their academic reputations on the proposition that anybody who questions the likelihood that there are bodies in that old apple orchard is equivalent to a Nazi who should be put in prison for two years. Academic and political reputations have been built on camelops and everything that happened after. and that's why it is such a sensitive topic, one of the reasons why. And I mean, I, in the community itself, you know, I know some of those people. And I remember a couple of months, I think it was after Manny, after my piece came out, a year of the graves.

I know Manny Jules, half my life, more than half my life. Former chief and a really important guy, very, very important leader. And Mani was very clear, you know, like the 13 major families in to Kemlips, they want to see an exhumation or an excavation of some kind. We can't just keep this up. We need to deal with this, right? And also, around that time, there was a perfectly reputable geospatial site inspection guy who, who provided the can who's curious about all this you know just as an innocent citizen who happens to be a professional in these areas who said wait a minute i've done you know here's a here's a you can

get these site surveys that show very clearly the history of soil disturbances in the vicinity of the orchard there's absolutely no reason to assume that the anomalies that you have encountered encountered can be explained by what even a lot of the older Camloops people said were just scare stories they were telling each other when they were kids. That there were, you know, there was all these septic drainage tiles and all this other work that had gone on there. That report was given to Chief Casimir. I think it's a terrible position that they have allowed themselves to be put into.

They've got to sort of carry on as though it is true, that there are, you know, that these stories about children being woken up in the middle of the night and forced to dig graves for their dead classmates in these weird rituals overseen by nuns in the middle of the night, under the moonlight, that these stories are somehow true. You know, so many people, I mean, what does, what would Justin, what happens if there's, you know, an excavation there? And it proves absolutely nothing. And you have leading members of the community who are finally unafraid to say, we told you so, we told you so.

What's Justin Trudeau going to say? The next time he, you know, during a break in one of the, you know, his dance videos, with Katie Perry, you know, a reporter says, it turns out that Caleb's thing was, it wasn't what you said it was. Nobody wants this story to be fully and honestly told. Or very few people do. And I would say this goes for, I don't want to, you know, sort of both sides, if you like, of the argument.

The people who are called denialists and the people who make the accusation of denialism. I don't want to overgeneralize. I think Francis is an honest broker, for sure, Francis Woodson. I think also Barbara Kay is a perfectly honest and decent person. I mean, these are people whose opinions are just totally different than my own. But, you know, nobody wants to see that community of people vindicated. So it's just this is what happens when you won't deal with the truth.

It gets away on you, you know. And there are a lot of journalists in this country who are going to want to scrub their bylines from a whole bunch of stories they've written, you know, about children's corpses sunk at the bottom of lakes and priests decapitating altar boys and babies being thrown, you know, thrown into ovens. A lot of people have actually vested a great deal of political capital and income and reputation in these stories being true. I guess my follow-up just out of curiosity would be like one of my criticisms, and I think you'd be sympathetic to the First Nation. It sounds like you are. But is that we're governments. Yes. So we can't.

We can't. We're taking taxpayer at all. Like we're not, it's not like we made a thing, like none of, none of anybody else's business, which is how I feel like the nation is kind of phrasing it. Like this is our, our business. It's not your business. And it's like, well, you made it a national headline. Like it's no longer just your business now. You made it a global phenomenon. Obviously, in keeping with Justin Trudeau and the liberal party and the media and all of these things. But you were a participant in this process. And so now it's not just your business anymore. Now you can't. I don't think it's a defensible position to say, this is for our community to decide now. Like, no, you made it a public thing. If you didn't want it to be a public thing,

it shouldn't have gone out in the news, it shouldn't have had a press release, it didn't need to be like a national story. You let it be, and now the roosters have come home and you have to deal with the consequences of that. And I think it's wrong of them because this is having impacts not just on their community. It's impacting my community.

It's impacting people on the East Coast. impacting First Nations and indigenous people across Canada. And so the consequences of your actions aren't just being felt by you. I'm being called a grifter because of what they did. And like that's leaking on to other First Nations. This is something that's really important to notice is that one thing that I find, you know, another opinion I actually have on the subject is, and it's main, I get a little bit angry.

I have to confess when I have, you know, this vast, body of literature that has come to be called the oral tradition and in the case of the Stalo it would be Chalas, the Transformer and then the stories of Raven

and and you know Hokhok, the great bird of heaven further up the coast. I mean the Norse sagas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, that level of literature,

right? Serious stuff, world patrimony conflated with stories that your uncle said he heard his grandfather tell him about one of his class, something one of his classmates said. You know,

these are different types of literature, different types of knowings, different types of knowledge, different types of oral history. The conflation of these things, I think is just unspeakable. The conflation of the residential school system in Canada with the Nazi death camps of the 1930s and 40s,

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. No. The conflation of the very, very, very real suffering that indigenous people, many indigenous people endured in residential schools. Not in some kind of Oprah Winfrey way. I'm talking, you know, court evidence, convictions of people who abuse the children in their care,

the conflation of the agonies of those indigenous people, with fabulous stories about, you know, children being woken up in the night to bury their classmates. I'm sorry. You know, in the real world, we got to deal with the real world. And in the real world, I think, there is now a fairly significant body of evidence to suggest that a great deal of harm was done to reconciliation, to Canadian identity, to our understanding of our own shared history by this, mass psychosis that was induced largely by the federal government and that a lot of journalists

in this country collaborated in. I don't think anybody wants to, you know, there's not, people don't want to deal with this. People do not want to deal with what happened. And so the people who will notice that, wait a minute, you know, a lot of lies were told. A lot of people who will be saying these things, they don't. don't have a filter. Well, let's be cut. I put it that way. I'm not saying Francis Whittleson, some people around that community, they basically do. They want to get rid of,

you know, get rid of the Indian Act, get rid of treaties, get rid of status, you know, screw this Aboriginal rights nonsense. Um, you know, there's all kinds of agendas at work here, I think, and we really should be honest about that. That is certainly the case in the matter of the couch indecision. That's certainly the case in the matter of the way the provincial government has, I think, foolishly attempted to integrate the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People into every single statute and zoning by law and traffic ticket in PC. Bless their hearts for trying, I guess. I don't want to be mean about this. But the whole damn conversation is just so

wounding now, so furious and crazy. A lot of damage has been done by this, a lot of damage. May I ask, based on everything presently known, what do you believe is beneath the Camloops orchard? Children's burials, unrelated disturbances, or something we cannot yet identify? Well, that's interesting question.

And I, you know what's interesting about it? The word believe. that's what it's come down to, right? You can't, you know, we're not allowed to, it's not about what we're allowed to know. It's what we're expected to believe. And I've always said from the beginning, given, you know, what we know,

just on a preliminary, you know, if I didn't know what I already knew about, you know, these stories about Queen Elizabeth kidnapping children from the Camelops and residential schools and taking them away, all this stuff. On the face of it, it's not entirely implausible that through the history of this Indian residential school,

that there would be the remains of children that were unaccounted for in an orchard. It's not totally implausible. Just very briefly, there are children who die. at residential schools and whose remains were never brought home. This happened. This happened. And, you know, the federal government committed, took them five years, I think. They committed only $38 million to memorializing these sites at old residential schools. And only $5 million

of that money had been spent by the time the Camlip story broke. I don't know what to believe. I only know what I know. And I know what I can reasonably conclude. And I think a reasonable person would have to conclude that if you're making an extraordinary claim, my God, a massive crime scene, 215 corpses, you know, secret moonlight burial rituals, if you're making an extraordinary claim, like, a massive crime scene, 215 corpses, you know, secret, moonlight burial rituals. If you're making an extraordinary claim like that, what I believe is that you should at least have an ordinary degree of evidence to support it. That's all. And we don't have anything like it.

We have no evidence to support it. The Globe and Mail has called the original coverage a failure of journalism, while Canada land has revisited its treatment of the story. Do you feel vindicated? Well, I felt vindicated a long time ago, I suppose. I felt vindicated as soon as I sent the story into the National Post before it even appeared. But I get what you mean. To some extent, I think. I mean, at the time, people should remember it wasn't public because it was too scary to say anything like this.

But there were indigenous people who were calling me from across the country saying, you hang, you know, serious people. Hang in there. This is a complicated story. You tried to tell the story of what happens. Something very strange happened in 2001. And I had journalists for every major news organization in the country phoning me up and saying, you hang in there, Glavin. What you did was important.

And I also saw what happened to journalists who said that publicly, how wickedly and viciously they were treated. Just for saying, yeah, Glavin's written an interesting piece here. People should read it. So, yeah, I guess you could say I feel vindicated to some extent, since my story still holds up after all this time. Yeah. I also find it very odd, don't you? The people say, oh, my God, you know, this long overdue reckoning with residential schools. And my God, we didn't know about these horror stories about children being taken away from their families and all this tuberculosis and all these deaths.

well, you know, where the hell have you been? You didn't know this? Like, you know, people who shouting the loudest, you know, declaring their virtue, you know, confessing their absolute ignorance about this chapter or not in Canadian history, you know. So, yeah, vindication, it's not something, I mean, it sounds like a boast if I were to say that, so I'm reluctant. I guess I would just challenge that, that type of thinking. of like feeling like I get why you would feel like it's boasting. But I think we're in a time now you talked about like post-truth era where the only thing you have is your credibility on the last story, in my opinion.

Like where you land on these issues currently really define you with Canadians. If you don't, if you got the COVID story wrong and you have not come out to take accountability for potentially reporting that wrong, I'm not saying you did. I'm just saying if you get those types of stories wrong and you don't come forward, and confess you were wrong, you have no credibility. And so credibility, I think, is growing. It used to be, if you had a badge that said the CBC or global news, you had credibility. Now it's, where are you on these issues?

And can the audience or can Canadians trust you to be an honest broker? And why people like Francis are growing followings is because they're willing to say the uncomfortable thing. The media ignores them. And they just continue to grow because people are like, well, they're being honest and you're not, and so I'm not going to bet it all on the global news that won't even touch this story. Yeah, I do find it amusing that Francis is sort of dismissed as this disreputable right-wing nutcase when, in fact, she's not. I mean, she comes from a left-wing, Hagellian, even Marxist

tradition of thought, but also that people who complain about the right wing making, hey, out of this issue, well, that's what you get. If people aren't, if people, if reasonable people of reasonable political opinion are not going to deal with these issues reasonably and honestly, there's going to be somebody who will, who will make a big deal of it, and you might not like them. Like this is, I think, a very interesting, it's kind of a function of our epoch, or the moment in history, is if you look at Trumpism in the United States, the big question I have, I have to ask the Democrats is, how did you lose to this guy?

you know, I mean, and the other thing, you know, you said something very interesting, you know, you said something along the lines of, you know, the truth is really all we have, right? That used to be a very, very important bit of knowledge that even in the great causes of social change in social justice, well, the wealthy might have the armies and the banks and the insurance companies and but we have the truth and the truth will out, right? You could say that. Now, if you can't say that, then you've got nothing. You got nothing.

This is also interesting, very much an establishment issue, that this is mainly a phenomenon of wealthy white people or upper middle class white people. If you talk to most indigenous people, I mean, they listen to the CBC like everybody else does, so, you know, on this issue, they might not be as well informed as you might imagine. Do people still listen to CBC?

I'm not sure about that. Well, curiously, you know, there is a problem. You know, you should be, you remind me of Peterzovsky. Are you older? You're probably not old enough to remember Peter Zoski. I am. He was a CBC radio guy, beloved across Canada. Didn't matter when you're conservative or liberal.

You know, a guy who could talk to fishermen in Newfoundland and loggers on Vancouver Island. And it was a place, you know, we had what was it called Morningside? what you do, by the way, is very much like that tradition. CBC should hire you and pay you seriously big money for what you do. CBC used to do this. CBC used to do it. They're busy ignoring my existence and pretending we don't have a platform here. But Terry, how can people follow your work?

Well, you can read the National Post. I would very much like it if people would subscribe to my newsletter. It's called The Real Story. sake, save me from myself and take out a paying subscription. I'm an idiot. I just, you know, I just recently learned it was buy, low, sell high. I mean, I was just such a fool. I was on Michael Campbell's Money Talks podcast a couple of weeks ago, and he lectured me about how I'm not running my business properly, and he's probably right. But it doesn't matter. Just subscribe to my newsletter, and I very much appreciate it.

Well, thank you for doing this, Terry. I have a lot of respect for people who come out on issues and state their position and lay out their argument clearly and take a lot of negative feedback. I respect Francis for being willing to do what she does because it's not evident when you get removed from your university that it's the right decision. Like a lot of people would choose the safety and security of their job over speaking what they believe to be the truth. And I believe you did the same thing. and we're maligned for that. And it takes a lot of bravery and courage and a certain type of integrity to do those types of things. So it's just always a privilege to speak to people like yourself who are seeking out the nuance and trying to find a way to honor what you heard from real world accounts, right? Both you and I have spoken to people who were abused and harmed and have bad experiences. But that doesn't mean we run from the conversation about Camloops and go like,

well, I heard their story so I'm not going to deal like being an honest broker on this tissue because they're different. And we can acknowledge that and hold space for both. So I'm just very grateful for your time today. Well, you're very kind. Thank you very much, Aaron. And I wish you all the best strength to your sword arm. I think you're doing magnificent work. And keep it up.