Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

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I'm Jonathan Kay.

And today we're going to be talking about a blockbuster story

that you might remember from 2021,

when it was dramatically announced, including by the New York Times no less, that a

mass grave containing the remains of 215 indigenous children had been found in Kamlo't looped British Columbia on the grounds of a former residential school,

one of the infamous institutions where indigenous children once were sent as part of a

national Canadian plan to assimilate indigenous peoples.

You may also remember that the story caused an explosion of national self-recrimination in Canada,

with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau going down on one knee to place a teddy bear on the grounds of one First Nation, and then lowering the flags on Canadian federal buildings for, astonishingly, more than five months. The story spread like wildfire in the

Canadian media that these weren't just the graves of indigenous children, which

would be bad enough, but that these were murder victims, babies thrown into furnaces, secret midnight burials with

indigenous children woken up to dig graves for their brothers and sisters in the apple orchard of that

Camloop school. It was like something out of a horror film and Canadians

braced for the sight of bodies being plucked out of the ground now that the

location of these child graves had supposedly been identified with ground penetrating

radar. But then something very strange happened. Days passed, then weeks, then months, and it's now been more than a year since that first supposed discovery of 215 presumed child graves.

...