by Kurt Mahlburg
To its credit, the London-based tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail recently carried a story most corporate news outlets have been avoiding: The Indian Residential School Graves hoax.
The paper, whose article titles are characteristically long and descriptive, leaves little mystery in the scandalous story’s headline: “Nearly ONE HUNDRED churches across Canada have been torched or damaged after activists lied that 200 indigenous children were buried under Catholic schools.”
The report begins:
Almost 100 Christian churches in Canada have been systematically targeted in apparent revenge attacks following a hoax about mass graves containing Native American children.
In 2021, a horrific story swept the internet as an indigenous group in Saskatchewan claimed to find 751 unmarked graves under the Marieval Indian Residential School, weeks after 215 children were supposedly discovered under another school in British Columbia.
The schools were run by Christian churches—largely Catholic—and sought to eliminate their students’ Indigenous culture so they could ‘assimilate’ into Canadian society.
However, excavations carried out last year failed to turn up any evidence of bodies, and most experts concluded that claims of mass graves were exaggerated.
It is a shocking revelation, made more relevant in the United States after a similar spate of church attacks that followed the overturning of Roe v. Wade —and one that deserves global attention.
The most recent events in the Canadian saga took place in August last year, when a month-long excavation near the Pine Creek Residential School in Manitoba yielded no human remains. Two prior excavations at former residential school sites that supposedly harbored mass graves of Indigenous children also turned up no evidence.
The excavations were undertaken in response to a great moral panic that overcame Canada in 2021, when ground-penetrating radar allegedly revealed some 1,000 gravesites at residential schools known to have housed and educated Indigenous children.
The schools were first run by religious groups between the 1840s and the 1960s, and then by the Canadian government. The last one closed its doors in 1996.
The first announcement of an alleged mass grave came in May 2021 from leaders of the Tk’emlúps band in British Columbia, who believed they had discovered the remains of 215 Indigenous children.
The following month, 751 alleged grave sites, mostly of children, were located near a former school in the province of Saskatchewan by another Indigenous group.
A month later, the Penelakut Tribe of British Columbia claimed to have uncovered 160 more unmarked graves.
While the media indulged in a predictable anti-Christian feeding frenzy, left mostly unsaid in their reporting was that no graves had been physically unearthed. Rather, anomalies and disturbances in the soil had been detected with radar equipment and were merely assumed to be the graves of children.
Prior research had suggested that high rates of child deaths, mostly due to disease, had taken place at Canada’s residential schools, making the assumption somewhat within the bounds of possibility.
However, the “discoveries” of 2021 saw reason and archeology cast to the side, as Canadian politicians and journalists scrambled over one another to paint the speculative finding as a colonial—and largely Catholic —atrocity.
Almost every major Canadian news outlet treated the radar-inspired assumptions as unquestioned fact. Canada Day was effectively cancelled that year, while violent activists tore down monuments to Captain Cook, Queen Victoria, and Queen Elizabeth II.
Not one to shy from woke theatrics, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered all flags on federal buildings to be flown at half-mast and had them raised again only six months later on Remembrance Day, making it the longest period in Canada’s history that the flag has stayed at half-mast.
Even Pope Francis visited Canada, delivering a lengthy apology in the province of Alberta, where he “humbly beg[ged] forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians.”
It was in the aftermath of so much drama that the wave of anti-Christian violence began. As tallied by Rebel News journalist Drea Humphrey, at least 96 churches have been burned down or otherwise vandalized by radical activists in the years since. Bizarrely, many of the churches that were targeted were located on tribal lands and attended by Indigenous Canadians.
Now that Canada’s Indian Residential School Graves “scandal” has turned out to be a hoax, where do the real victims go for their apology? Will politicians or the press, the Prime Minister or the Pope set things right?
The world is watching.
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Kurt Mahlburg is an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate architect, a primary school teacher, a missionary, and a young adults pastor. Since 2018, Kurt has been the Research and Features Editor at the Canberra Declaration. He is also a freelance writer and a regular contributor at Mercator, the Spectator Australia, Caldron Pool, and Intellectual Takeout. He is married to Angie, who hails from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
