Thank you for posting this. It’s good to be reminded that even people who think they are smart fall into the exact herd behavior built-in to human psychology.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-residential-schools-...
"some journalists — in Canada and abroad — mistakenly called the unmarked graves being located "mass graves," inadvertently invoking the horrors of the Holocaust. But the vast majority, following the lead of Indigenous spokespeople, got it right"
The problem with this is that it's impossible to verify - who are "some journalists", and who is the "vast majority"? But anyway, if you google for "215 children bodies found", you'll find that claim plastered all over the Net. First-page search results include CBC itself, BBC, NPR, CNN etc. So this is, at best, misleading.
The other statement that made me go hmph is:
"Denialists, to be clear, do not deny the existence of residential schools or even some of the harms of the IRS system. Rather, they seek to downplay or distort basic IRS facts and question the validity of ongoing research to shake public confidence and undermine truth and reconciliation efforts. "
It is unclear which "basic facts" they claim to be distorted. The article admits that it's not the existence of schools or the abuse that happened in them in general. I've read some of the denialist articles, and the only claims regarding facts of the matter can find there are that no bodies - indeed, no graves! - have actually been verified in this one particular case. That claim is easy to verify.
The article seems to be claiming, in essence, that any skepticism in this regard is inherently wrong, regardless of facts or lack thereof.
We know for a fact that graves existed. We just don't know where some of them are, because they were abandoned.
So, what is being added to the story by saying "this particular discovery of a potential grave location hasn't yet dug up a dead child"?
There's other grave sites where actual bodies were discovered after floods or roadworks, where they've identified what they think are other graves via the same tech.
Those haven't been dug up either, because just randomly digging up graves on an arbitrary schedule to prove to some kook's satisfaction that you have the right to talk about something is absurd.
"I think my grandfather died in France during world war I and is buried somewhere in this field but the records are patchy so even after looking for decades we're still not certain" is something you respond to with empathy, not skepticism and demands for certain proof.
Because the evidence so far can have many explanations, graves being only one among them. The place apparently has a history of agricultural use, too, with several rounds of irrigation works.
It doesn't disprove that those are graves, of course. It's quite plausible that at least some of them are. But I don't feel like, on the balance of probability, it makes sense to make claims about "200+ children bodies", given the evidence we have so far.
> "I think my grandfather died in France during world war I and is buried somewhere in this field but the records are patchy so even after looking for decades we're still not certain" is something you respond to with empathy, not skepticism and demands for certain proof.
Well, for starters, nobody actually claimed to be a relative of some specific person that is ostensibly buried there. Indeed, it seems that there are no claims made of specific people being buried there at all - no names, just "N children". So the more accurate analogy would be "I think someone's grandfather died in WW1 and is buried somewhere in this field, but I don't actually know any of the people involved".
More importantly, if there are bodies there, a crime was committed - and many of the people responsible (if only for negligence allowing it to be committed) are still alive, so their reputation is directly affected by the claim. Organizational responsibility is also at stake; not that I have any love for the Catholic Church, mind you, but I'd rather blame them for the things they actually did.
If and when they dig up the holes, and they do indeed turn out to be graves of children - then I'll join the torches-and-pitchforks mob. But I resent the attempts to goad me into that before the facts are known - and it is exactly what the headlines in the media originally tried to do.
The original claim made by the people who did the survey was that they think they've found graves of children who went to the school.
You're talking about people overreacting and making things up in foreign newspapers, then making an argument based on stuff that you've just claimed isn't true.
And it appears intended to distract from the fact that we know for a fact there are graves and we know for a fact there were crimes. But by laser focussing and saying, this particular potential grave has not been proved to be a grave to my satisfaction, you get to cast doubt on all the known graves and known crimes.
I'm not repeating the argument that the bodies must be dug out because there was a crime (although I also don't see how it is invalid, because this discovery is combined with oral sources which do claim some very serious crimes).
What I'm saying is that if this is all true, then there are people responsible for it, who would be rightly held to account - if not legally, then in court of public opinion. So when newspapers publish articles that strongly imply that it's all definitive when it actually isn't, someone's reputation is ruined.
> you get to cast doubt on all the known graves and known crimes.
Here's the thing, though. Every denialist article I've looked at trying to figure out what exactly they claim - and there were like 5 - clearly spelled out that, yes, there was plenty of abuse in those schools in general, and that said abuse did result in dead children. On the other hand, almost every article criticizing them makes the same claim you do - that them casting doubt on the claims made in this particular case casts doubt on the whole thing, somehow. All disclaimers are ignored.
This looks like a classic strawman to me, not a good-faith attempt at fair discourse.
Except of course they did deny it was happening and very slowly retreated further and further as more and more proof mounted, only giving up when their lies are totally destroyed in the court of public opinion while still being shrilly outraged at every new "lie" or "exagerration" from the people who were right all along. Things that in future they'll deny believing when its convenient and then bring up again later.
So the climate or Holocaust victims are never allowed to make a single mistake, or its a media fueled panic, while the deniers get to construct their own reality as they please, again and again, and it's rude to point that out to them, because they're just being skeptical about children's graves for purely scientific reasons.