More on those non-existent graves of indigenous children in Canada (yesterday), and the fetishisation of indigenous “ways of knowing”, from Jonathan Kay at Quillette:
I’ve often used the term “social panic” to describe the unmarked-graves claims that swept through Canada in 2021. For reasons described below, the term feels inadequate. But I can’t think of any word or phrase that better captures the spasm of manic self-denigration that unfolded following the purported discovery of 215 dead children (some “believed to be as young as three years old,” gullible reporters told us) on the grounds of a former Indigenous residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia.
Those claims, originally announced by Kamloops First Nation Chief Rosanne Casimir, set off a frenzied rhetorical bidding war among pundits and politicians, each trying to outdo one another in heaping shame upon their country. It would take months, or even years in many cases, before mainstream media outlets began admitting—tacitly or otherwise—that they’d been duped by Casimir’s fake news (as the Globe & Mail newspaper finally did last month)….
One telling detail that Canadians should have paid more attention to at the time: The Kamloops GPR survey was conducted by an activist anthropologist named Sarah Beaulieu, who’d explicitly set out to provide “validation” for pre-existing Indigenous claims in Kamloops.
The way Beaulieu’s data was presented to Canadians by reporters is important, as it shows that it wasn’t just simple ignorance that sparked the unmarked-graves social panic, but also the more general tendency to treat Indigenous claims about the past as beyond refutation, passed down in the manner of religious truths. This is why the term “social panic” can be misleading, as it suggests a phenomenon that is reflexive and mindless; whereas what happened to Canada in 2021 is connected to a well-established ideological movement.
When Chief Casimir made her false claims, Beaulieu’s university put out a press release approvingly quoting her description of this activist approach. (“My findings confirmed what Elders had shared…an example of science playing an affirming role of what the Knowledge Keepers already recognized.”) In 2024, long after ordinary Canadians had figured out there were no unmarked graves in Kamloops, Beaulieu even received an award from the Governor General for her important “innovations” in the archaeological field.
There’s a great book (or, at least, a PhD thesis) to be written about how the use of profound-seeming cultic language contributed to the sense of certainty surrounding the non-existent graves. Casimir herself said that Beaulieu’s survey project had been directed by “knowings,” which in turn had been provided by “Knowledge Keepers.”
One of the most prominent journalists to immediately leap on the story was Tanya Talaga, who’d already instructed Canadians that they inhabited a genocide state, and that anyone denying this fact was functioning as “a tool of genocide”. She proceeded to write a book called The Knowing, channelling the fashionable idea that Beaulieu’s GPR readings weren’t mere scientific data, but rather the electromagnetic manifestation of unfalsifiable Indigenous lore….
The extremely strange idea that Indigenous people possess magical brain powers didn’t spring up overnight in 2021. It’s a quasi-religious idea that’s suffused intellectual life in my (otherwise highly secularised) country for generations.
Almost exactly a decade ago, I wrote a magazine article entitled, How First Nations Became a Prop for White Activists: The modern myth of the ‘Magical Aboriginal’ is distorting our national conversation; wherein I discussed a then-recently published guide to reconciliation, in which Indigenous characters were portrayed as Delphic savants spouting Yoda-esque epigrams such as “There is much loss—but all is not lost.”
This was in 2016, five years before the unmarked-graves farce. But even then, I warned readers, the whole reconciliation movement was being captured by the same organic-food-aisle types who went in for astrology and dilettantish takes on eastern mysticism.
Since then, this kind of magical language has become normalised in Canadian public discourse, wherein Indigenous people are often described as “sacred” prophets and martyrs, while their communities are cast as new Edens situated within the white supremacist Canaan known as Canada. A magazine article published shortly before the unmarked-graves announcement warned Canadians of an Indigenous-prophesied “apocalypse” (caused by global warming it seems) that would annihilate the white population while leaving Indigenous people unharmed insofar as they remained on their Ark-like reserves. In Ontario, a document prepared by the province’s public elementary-school teachers’ union instructed educators on the supposedly “sacred” (the word appears 33 times) Indigenous tradition of “two-spiritedness,” which the authors describe as an ethnically deflected “anti-colonial” variant of transgenderism.
To quote but one example of the absurd bafflegab cited by the authors of that report:
It is sacred and is more than just words—it is a spirit/heart language…When Two-Spirit is used it invokes our sacredness and reminds us that we have always been here, and we will always be here. As a result, with Two-Spirit comes a great responsibility, to those who use it, as we walk and work in a sacred way with and for our people.
In fact, the term “two-spirit” was invented 36 years ago, at a conference in Winnipeg, where a woman named Myra Laramee informed a “sharing circle” that the term had come to her in a dream. When it comes to the officially sanctioned understanding of Indigenous gender identity, as with unmarked graves, such spirit visions are now credited as reliable research…
Echoes of the Carlos Castaneda scam from the Seventies – The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge and the follow-ups – which I’ll admit had me hooked at the time, in those far-away dope-filled days. American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda, coming out soon, is currently sitting in my Amazon shopping basket. The urge to construct a fantasy indigenous world of shamanistic power, opposed to and concreted over by crass western materialism, is ever with us. And when it’s fuelled by settler-colonialist guilt, as in Canada, well…
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