Transcript: Terry Glavin

My interview with the Canadian journalist and author

It has now been five years since the Kamloops band made an announcement of the discovery of “the remains of 215 children” at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, kicking off an intense period of national grief and anger. A month ago, The Globe and Mail editorial board made news around the world, declaring the national press’s lack of scrutiny of the claim a “failure of journalism.” My guest is an award-winning journalist who was early on this story. He’s here to unpack its aftermath.

Terry Glavin is a Canadian journalist, author, and columnist for The National Post. This is an edited transcript. You can listen to the interview here.

TH: You are an award-winning journalist with a long career. You have covered Indigenous issues for decades. You’ve written a number of books, including one with residential school survivors. I wanted to have you on the show today so we could discuss a very thorny, contentious story in our country, which you were very early on — and which The Globe and Mail’s editorial board recently came out and called a “failure of journalism.” Just so the audience has the context, five years ago, in May of 2021, Tkʼemlúps announced, with the help of ground-penetrating radar, that it had “confirmation of the remains of 215 children,” deceased students from the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Statues were torn down in our country. At least two dozen churches were torched. More were vandalized. Demonstrations were staged from coast to coast. A wave of similar announcements followed. At one point, the tally was more than 1,300 potential burials. Flags in federal buildings were at half-mast for five months. Hundreds of millions of dollars in government funds were allocated to assist First Nations’ investigations, and The Canadian Press declared it the story of 2021. Terry, take me back to where you were in 2021. You were a contributing editor at Maclean’s magazine. What were you thinking as you watched all of this play out?

TG: I can bring you back to that Thursday afternoon. I had just dropped my daughter off at the ferry, and of course the story was international by then. It only took me about 15 or 20 minutes to realize what was really going on. I called my boss at Maclean’s, Charlie Gillis, who I guess was the national editor. Charlie actually comes from the Kamloops area. Both of us right then said, “We need to get on top of this. We need to get ahead of this story because it’s getting out of control.” I understood where the story was coming from. I don’t want to blame the Kamloops tribal leadership for the mayhem, although they do bear some responsibility. It really starts ... I wrote a piece years earlier about this crazy Protestant defrocked United Church minister.

TH: Tell me what your reporting found.

TG: What we knew to be true was that the story about a mass grave at Kamloops was more or less the invention of a conspiracy theorist. He was a Protestant and he’d been driven out of the United Church. I’d written about this years earlier. He was a scourge to Indigenous communities. He was going around with these theories about this mass archipelago of mass graves at residential schools across the country. And suddenly it found its way to the front pages of newspapers around the world —

TH: Just to interject for one moment, this individual also spread a rumour that Queen Elizabeth had abducted children from Kamloops in 1964. This actually spread so widely that Reuters debunked it just months before the grave announcement.

TG: Agence France-Presse and others had to issue — after the Kamloops graves story broke — similar alerts: No, Queen Elizabeth did not kidnap these children. I actually was ahead of the story even years before when I first wrote about it because I knew him. I knew Kevin Annett. In the Vancouver area, he was at the time known as a really interesting young Trotskyist and he was driven out of these Trotskyist organizations.

Anyway, the story breaks on a Thursday, May 27. Immediately I phoned Charlie, my boss at Maclean’s, and I said, “We need to get out ahead of this. We can’t allow this craziness to take over the story about Canada’s Indian residential schools.” I had been covering this as a journalist. I’d written a couple of books set in Indian country, as we used to say, with the Gitxsan. I lived up in the Gitxsan territory for a while. With the Chilcotins, I lived out on reserve for a while. Those are now the two leading Aboriginal title cases in Canada. I’d also co-authored a book with former students of St. Mary’s Indian Residential School. I was not unfamiliar with the issue, not unfamiliar with the story. So, Maclean’s said, “Yeah, we’ve got to do this. Let’s do it.” My beat had actually been international human rights — the right of small nations, if you like. I’d been to Syria and throughout the Middle East, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India. That was my beat. But I was pulled back into this because of this craziness. The tragedy is, it’s really a tragedy of journalism. The story that I wrote that caused so much fuss, Year of the Graves, wasn’t even about residential schools. It was about journalism.

In the case of Maclean’s, I was assigned to the story. It was evolving at the time. These events that were punctuated throughout the summer — alleged discoveries of graves — and then the Prime Minister would kneel and he’d go to a grave and he’d say all these terrible things about colonialism and imperialism and white racism and what have you. All of these churches were being burned. So anyway, I filed my story to Maclean’s, and it didn’t run. It sat there. Charlie and I would talk back and forth, and the conversations became increasingly circumspect. This was at a time when Maclean’s imploded. Maclean’s used to be a really important [publication] ... It’s really old. I don’t know, it was a century old. It was a journalistic institution in Canada, like Canada’s version of Time magazine or Newsweek or any of these really important institutions. There were about a dozen of us that just discovered that we were no longer employed by Maclean’s. My story did not run. The editor was worried. The senior, senior editor was worried that she’d even authorized the assignment. I won’t name her because I try to be fair.

But The National Post came to me in the lead-up to the anniversary and says, “You got to write this story.” So, I did. It was 5,000, 6,000 words. Still holds up. 1,300 reported secret burials of children at residential schools across the country: Shubenacadie, Cowessess, Penelakut, Kamloops, St. Eugene’s and so on. No graves were discovered. No child was discovered. None of the children who were said by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — 3,200 kids — to have died after having been enrolled at residential schools, from various causes, sometimes buried adjacent to the residential schools, sometimes buried adjacent to sanatoria. It was mainly tuberculosis. Throughout the summer, anywhere in Canada, there was no child’s grave found. There were cemeteries. I think two or three of them were, you could call them residential school cemeteries, I suppose. But more often than not, they were Catholic cemeteries that were near, or adjacent to, or associated with residential schools.

The whole thing, to my mind — and it’s something I had been writing about for a long time — was this peculiar complex in which you see the absolute implosion of what we now call legacy media, conventional journalism, the shuttering of newsrooms across the country, across the continent, co-terminus with a very peculiar phenomenon within the realm of epistemology, how society goes about the work of determining what is true and what is false. So, we had 300 years of Enlightenment experience in this matter, and we had institutions that came up in the disciplines of the Enlightenment. Then you had this very peculiar phenomenon that began to emerge in the 1960s, 1970s, associated with the Frankfurt School of Marxism, and with a number of postmodernist thinkers that problematized the truth. [It] wasn’t really left wing actually, wasn’t really Marxist. Anyway, at the end of the day, that massive event that occurred in 2021 — and we’re still seeing it, it didn’t stop in 2021 — actually added absolutely nothing new to the public record about residential schools. There was no long overdue reckoning. We always talk about “long overdue.” There was no long overdue reckoning that occurred. It was a national psychotic episode. I really don’t know how else to characterize it.

TH: Now there is more open discussion about this since the Globe and Mail editorial came out, and many of us in the press are trying to unpack what happened and how this happened and what the consequences are for the press corps, for the country, for Indigenous people, for reconciliation. One turning point was [when] the Kamloops band held a press conference in July of 2021. During that press conference, the ground-penetrating radar specialist said this: “With ground-penetrating radar, we can never say definitively that there are human remains until you excavate, which is why we need to pull back a little bit and say they are probable burials. They are targets of interest for sure.” This could have been a turning point for us, in terms of applying more scrutiny here. Why do you think that didn’t make a dent in the narrative?

TG: I’d say the Indigenous people, particularly the ones most local to the stories — the ʔaq̓am community at St. Eugene’s, the old St. Mary’s Indian Band, the Cowessess tribe at Marieval in Saskatchewan — from the very outset tended to be the most circumspect and the most restrained. So when the ground-penetrating radar specialists in July made those comments, it was not inconsistent with what had been present and available to journalists, if they were actually asking questions and paying attention, from the very beginning. In fact, I think it was four days after my prime minister lowered the flags on Parliament Hill, declared that a mass grave had been discovered, Carolyn Parrish, the minister talking about a reckoning of the George Floyd variety that Canada was finally forced to have —

TH: This is Bennett, right? Carolyn Bennett.

TG: Yeah. Rosanne Casimir, four days after this, said, “Well, actually we didn’t say anything about a mass grave.”

TH: This is the chief of Kamloops.

TG: Yeah. So, the curious thing is that Kamloops is actually almost incidental to this — the reaction, particularly the lowering of the flags and the federal government, the prime minister of this country, adopting and forming and broadcasting an absolutely bizarre conspiracy theory that curiously has its origins in a lot of anti-Catholic hysteria in the United States in the 1830s and the 1840s. When you look at the origin of these stories, by the way — babies thrown into ovens, all this really lurid stuff — which shows up in the voluminous reports produced by the official federal inquisitor, Kimberly Murray, into residential schools, it’s almost word for word some of the more lurid anti-Catholic stuff that would appear in the press in the United States in the 1800s that led to the burning, famously, of the Ursuline Convent outside of Boston by the Protestants there. Of course, there were burnings of Catholic churches across the country. So, my government took on this stuff that was recapitulated by Kevin Annett, the United Church QAnon guy, and that became the dominant story of the year. It’s almost astonishing to look back on it. This is what happened in 2021, and it’s still the dominant ideological framework for understanding the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the settler culture and the Crown that prevails today. It’s the establishment view.

TH: We should point out that in your reporting in Year of the Graves, you were really calling the media to task. You do not have heterodox views on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which has extensive documentation of abuse that happened in these schools. I think it’s important to make that clear, while we are trying to tease out this argument. I want to say: You have all of these forces coalescing at once. You have these unsubstantiated rumours. You have real pain on some of these reserves, real legacies of abuse. And you have, as you say, a media that is very receptive and is not scrutinizing as they should. You have a prime minister that is involved in this story as well. But then you also have incredible social and later legal pressures acting against journalists. I want to just get into that. So, you published this piece in The National Post. There is an outcry. There was a group of academic organizations that labelled your reporting as “residential school denialism.” When Jesse Brown of the Canadaland podcast announced you were coming on, Jesse Wente, the chair of the board of the Canada Council for the Arts, urged him not to interview you. There was a lot of flak on social media. Then in 2023, your story was identified as an example of residential school denialism in an RCMP report on national security threats. How did you process all of that, Terry?

TG: I found it amusing, for the most part. It was painful, to some extent. It was a bit frightening from time to time. The curious thing is there’s the real world, and then there’s stuff that you read in the papers. Particularly here on CBC. Almost immediately, when the reaction began to build and it became a story about — you know, I became this hate figure — in fact, the individual, I guess he’s a professor, Sean Carleton, who kind of invented or co-invented the whole concept of residential schools denialism. There’s no such thing, by the way. It’s a weird ideological construct. [Carleton] referred to the Year of the Graves investigation that I published in the Post as a textbook case of residential school denialism.

When you look at the whole discourse around residential school denialism — including that Senate committee that proposed that residential school denialism be put in the same section of the Criminal Code that deals with Holocaust denial — what’s fascinating about this is that it dresses itself up as, “We have to protect the survivors from this harmful discourse,” and all this sort of thing. The people who would be protected by a Criminal Code injunction against this phantasm of residential school denialism, are people like Kimberly Murray, people like Sean Carleton, people like Carolyn [Bennett]. Our own prime minister. Those are the people who would be protected by it.

Because all I did, for instance, in this textbook case of residential schools denialism — it wasn’t even about residential schools. It offered absolutely no heterodox view about residential schools. I was pointing out that these are the people who said these things, and these things were not true. And they are very powerful and influential people.

A case could be made — I didn’t make it at the time — that they are using the genuine pain and suffering of actual human beings, flesh and blood Indigenous people, who did suffer agony in these schools, and whose criminal cases were heard and whose persecutors were sent to jail. It’s conflating their experience with these tales from the crypt stories about babies being thrown into ovens and so on and so forth. I think that’s what’s really going on here. There are a lot of powerful people in this country, a lot of powerful journalists, who don’t want the public reminded that they played a significant role in the instigation and the incitement of a national psychotic episode in which dozens and dozens of churches were burned to the ground. There were riots. Statues were knocked over. They’re basically mostly white. This is a story about white people losing their shit. This is mainly what that story is about.

TH: In terms of the residential school denialism, what you were just referring to, just for listeners outside of the country, is an amendment to a bill from the Senate about combating hate that would classify residential school denialism as a crime and be punishable by up to two years in prison. That did not ultimately pass in the Senate. It was rejected, but it was a close vote. In terms of the critics, if we can be at our most charitable [in] reading of what they’re reacting to, we have seen an increase in sentiment online of prejudice against Indigenous people. We have seen the meme “dig up or shut up” circulating. I think we have seen concerning movement in this country away from reconciliation. What do we make of that backlash?

TG: Well, what do we mean by reconciliation? Now, I have been a bit notorious, actually, for being a bit militant on the issue of Aboriginal rights and title. It is my view that the law is correct. That in British Columbia particularly, Crown title to the landmass that we now call British Columbia is burdened by legally enforceable Aboriginal rights and title. This is a mainstream conservative point of view. In fact, it has been mainstream since the Royal Proclamation of 1763. There’s nothing “woke” about it. There’s nothing faddish about it.

The Supreme Court of Canada identifies what reconciliation is. The Supreme Court more than once has described reconciliation as the necessary reconciliation between Crown sovereignty and Aboriginal rights and title. You have to fill that box. All this other stuff, whether it’s the excesses to which the provincial government here in B.C., for instance, has gone in trying to make the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples embedded in every single statute, codicil, and traffic ticket in B.C. — this is what you do instead of negotiating treaties. This is what you do instead of addressing the necessity of reconciling Crown sovereignty with Aboriginal title.

The other thing is, I think this is really sad … When I was asked to write, or to co-author, that work on the history of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and the St. Mary’s Indian Residential School with the former students, Chief Bill Williams came to me, a very powerful chief. At the time he was, I think, the head of the Mission Indian Friendship Centre. He said, “A lot of our people, as you know, Terry, they’re Catholics, and they’re not happy with the way this story is being told. It’s really kind of a complicated story, but it’s really an interesting story. It’s really textured. It’d be really nice — you’re a writer — if you could come in and give us a hand with this.” I remember saying to [him], I said, “Bill, look, I know people who’ve been hurt in those schools, and I am not going to write some sort of apologetics for either the church or for the schools.” He said, “Well, no, no, no. We don’t want you to do that.” I said, “I tell you what. What I’m going to do is, wherever I go on this, whatever I do on this, I’m going to ask my old friend Cyril Pierre to come with me.” Cyril is a lovely man. I’ve known him since I was a kid. He’s an elder now — gosh, I’m getting old too — at Katzie First Nation. He was abused, horribly, at St. Mary’s Mission. So I said, “Cyril, you and I are going to do this. You’re going to be my lodestar here.” That’s how I ended up writing the book. The interesting thing, people who had had wonderful experiences at St. Mary’s could sit in a little reserve house, smoking Export A Plain, having a cup of coffee, across the table from Cyril and maybe a couple of the grandkids. I’d be there taking notes. They could have conversations about it. And they would laugh. And they would cry. And they would just talk about people and talk about interesting stories.

The great tragedy here is that any young journalist who is interested and curious about the absolutely fantastic experience of Indigenous peoples from the close of the last ice age to the present day, the varied and weird and wonderful and awful aspects of the relationship between the waves of settlers that came and the Indigenous peoples, and how they hung on to their jurisdictions and persisted in their fisheries — just amazing stories. A lot of these old guys are still out there. If you’re a young journalist, I wouldn’t advise anybody going anywhere near this story. It is so poisoned. It is so damaged. I think that is a great tragedy here. We can’t talk openly about it.

One last thing. Yeah, it was really hard when I wrote that story. It was really tough. It was unpleasant. But at the same time, I can’t count the number of people from every single major news organization in Canada — broadcast, print — who reached out. There was at least one journalist from each organization who reached out to me, either a journalist or an editor, saying, “Hey, hang in there. Way to go. I know this is tough, but it’s got to be done.” And also Indigenous people. Some of them, a couple fairly militant, including Mohawks, saying, “Hey Glavin, hang in there. You’re alright. This complicated story has to be told.” One particular dear old friend who’s actually a hereditary chief in his own right, who is a CBC journalist, from the very beginning, he was like, “Why is everybody going crazy? This is a good story. It’s not even about residential schools, it’s about journalism.”

I think that’s the thing that we shouldn’t allow to be lost in this. This is about journalism. It’s about the collaboration of very powerful, influential, well-paid editors and journalists with the Prime Minister of my country and his cabinet in igniting and inciting a period of mania and hysteria in this country. As for the motivations of the Trudeau government — well, you know what Trudeau was like when he was prime minister. Reading his press releases was like reading the Tumblr account of some 19-year-old upper-middle-class frat boy who discovered social justice.

But the Truth and Reconciliation Commission actually contained a very important and necessary and useful recommendation: At these residential schools across the country, a lot of them, there’s still kids there. They’re buried there. There are little cemeteries and stuff, and we can’t figure out how many of them are buried there. There’s 3,200, and we’ve been able to find half of them, at least name them. Then there’s about 800 of them that we think are still buried at one of these residential school sites. What we really should be doing is we should be going to these places. We should be identifying the grave sites, memorializing the cemeteries, seeing if we can identify the kids in each one of them. And it’s a difficult job because some of these old residential schools, it’s hard enough to find them, let alone the cemeteries associated with them. Because they’re up in the Boreal forest, in the bush, or in the tangles of undergrowth someplace. It was a really good and necessary kind of closure to the whole business. The Trudeau government didn’t do anything about it, sat on it. I guess it would’ve been five years they sat on it. They did set aside, I think, about [$33] million, but only about three or four million dollars, or something like that, had been spent by the time the Kamloops thing erupted. I think one of the patterns that was so obvious with Justin Trudeau particularly is, in any sort of faddish — I hate to use the term “woke,” but people understand what I mean — that would erupt, he would always try to get out ahead of it. I think that largely was what he was up to.

But yeah, it really is about journalism. I don’t want to be too hard on people. You mentioned The Globe and Mail. Kind of a turning point in that you have this major, respectable legacy media organization that issues a public statement on the anniversary and says, “You know what? We kind of screwed this story up. It wasn’t all that great.”

TH: I’m trying to figure out where we go from here. Because we do not have a shared set of facts right now, and I think we need one. This issue can be very polarized, as you well know. But one person I see [who] is doing some incredible work on this is Chief Aaron Pete at the Chawathil First Nation. About a year and a half ago, he started interviewing critics of this story on his podcast. We should mention that his own grandmother attended residential school, St. Mary’s, and was abused there. Aaron has dealt with the aftermath of that in his own family. But he is really dedicated to open discourse. He wrote in The National Post that “a public that asks hard questions is not necessarily a hostile public,” and has committed himself to having debate with people who, in some cases, he disagrees with. What do you make of his approach?

TG: I like Aaron. It’s funny, Aaron and I have never talked. I think we’ve exchanged notes. I know some of his family. I know Chawathil. He’s this really bright young chief. He’s trying to make a name for himself as a podcaster. I think it’s really useful. The weird thing is he’s not a journalist. Yet he’s doing what we used to call journalism.

TH: Yes, indeed.

TG: He’s kind of fun. People can criticize some of the things he says, or some of his approaches, who cares. He’s just curious: “What’s really going on here?” Yeah, I think there needs to be much more of that sort of thing. That would help …

The first question that journalists should be asking in any contentious story, of any sort, on any beat, the first question has got to be: Is this true? Is it true? I think the way journalists... I mean, I came up the old way, right? Six years as an apprentice in the old guild system before you’re a journeyman journalist. If you behave yourself and you don’t screw up, two or three years further down the road, you might be entitled to an opinion. We really do, I think, need to rely on our own conventions. There are great, sturdy conventions within journalism that assist journalists in going about the business of answering the question: Is it true?

They are not all that difficult. You actually don’t need a journalism degree or a university degree. In fact, that might be more harm than good. [Laughs] You need to be curious, and you need to have a sense of who you’re writing for, and you need to be able to engage in that honourable and decent and necessary motivation that goes back thousands of years. What’s on the other side of that hill? How far is it from here? At what time of day, under what weather conditions, is it best to approach that particular canyon? This is ancient stuff. I think we have to remember that since Gutenberg, astonishing entire universes have opened up to us and they need to be traversed. They need to be explored. There’s a great deal of cartography that needs to be done.

It’s exciting and it’s fun, and you can actually make some use of yourself. You can perform a public service, and you can go to sleep at night and you can sleep the sleep of the just. And you can wake up in the morning and you can do it all over again. I think there is a wonderful opportunity for actual journalism to occur. I think there is a great public hunger for that. So, everything that I’ve said that sounds depressing — I hope people will walk away with a little bit of a brighter attitude.

TH: Terry, just lastly, the lessons for us from this story. What do we need to take away from this whole situation?

TG: It depends who you mean by “we.” I think I’ve exhausted what journalists should take away from the situation. I think people need to be very skeptical of what they are reading. I mean, it’s not always the case, but why am I reading this story? Who wants me to read it? Who’s benefiting from this story? Be skeptical. Don’t be cynical. Stop it. Don’t be cynical. Recognize, too, that journalists make mistakes. Journalists do make mistakes, and I think they should be kind of forgiven for them because a lot of their editors are run off their feet. I think the other thing the public should do is to not live in little media silos. Be a little bit more small-c catholic in one’s tastes. Look out there a little bit. Don’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out — there’s a lot of that going on. But yeah, take heart. Recognize that if you’re going to be a functioning member of society, you’re going to need to have a fairly good idea of what’s going on. Be skeptical, yes, but not too skeptical. Be forgiving. Be open-minded.