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If the Canadian Left were capable of embarrassment, it suffered a doozy late last month.

For two years, the vengeance-seeking Native American grievance mob, along with virtue-signaling whites, have been sharing horror stories about supposed mass graves of indigenous children hidden at Catholic schools across Canada. This all began in the spring of 2021, when ground-penetrating radar revealed anomalies at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia — anomalies which anti-white activists were quick to interpret as the remains of 215 murdered Native America children. The Roman Catholic Church ran the compulsory boarding school from 1890 until 1969 in an effort to compel — compel! — Indian assimilation into broader white society. The alleged bodies finally gave the Canadian Left proof of the lethality of White Supremacy — and, boy, did they run with it.

Predictably, the Indians raged and whites groveled as Canada gnashed its teeth in mourning. Prominent Canadians called for justice on Twitter with the hashtag #215children. James McCrae, a former Attorney General for Manitoba, resigned from a government panel after expressing skepticism about the accusations. The Roman Catholic Church became what Tom Wolfe described as “the Great White Defendant” as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called on Pope Francis to apologize, which he eventually did.

And, of course, the free money flowed from white to non-white, as it always does. According to the New York Post:

Within days of the Kamloops announcement, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau decreed, partly at the request of tribal leaders, that all flags on federal buildings fly at half-staff. The Canadian government and provincial authorities pledged about $320 million to fund more research and in December pledged another $40 billion involving First Nations child-welfare claim settlements that partially compensate some residential school attendees.

Amid this hysteria, however, it should be noted that no excavations had actually taken place. This was all based on wild speculation from partisan actors with axes to grind. According to Hot Air:

In June 2021, after the first claims of unmarked graves emerged, Murray Sinclair, former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), said the residential-school death toll ‘could be in the 15,000-to-25,000 range’. Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, director of the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at the University of British Columbia, called it a ‘genocide’.

The horror, I know.

In response to these purported atrocities, the ever-outraged Left has been acting with all the restraint, moderation, and compassion they are known for: They have been burning Catholic churches. So far, 54 have either been burned or vandalized.

54 Catholic churches burned or vandalized in Canada.

“I understand the anger that’s out there against the Catholic Church. It is real, and it’s fully understandable, given the shameful history.”#JustinTrudeau

So burn away, they got it coming to them?#tuesdayvibe pic.twitter.com/sxhQhLmykg

— Dr. Jimmy Yam (@JimmyJoeYam) July 28, 2021

Two years on, excavations have now been performed at various Catholic schools across Canada, and guess what? Not one single grave has been found. The sites include schools in Brantford, Nova Scotia, Edmonton, Manitoba, and British Columbia. Zero evidence has been unearthed at all of these sites to support the ghastly and defamatory claims of genocide perpetrated by the Catholic Church. Pro-native activists remain undeterred, however, and call for more excavations — a good example being Chief Derek Nepinak of the Pine Creek Indian Reserve, who recently turned up bubkes at a church basement in Manitoba and then referred to his efforts as an “initial excavation,” as if there are going to be more. As we all know, every empty dig is merely evidence of all the dead Indians we haven’t discovered yet.

As for the center-Right, their disgust at the mendacity and blatant political rhetoric of their ideological enemies is as palpable as it is justified. The Hot Air and Spiked articles are great examples of this. But few can surpass the Ace of Spades when it comes to righteous vitriol:

Will there be a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to document how the psychopathic liars of the left traffic in dangerous, incendiary blood libels to cadge another affirmative action benefit out of the government, or nah?

While I sympathize with Ace, his take — like all the others coming from the center-Right — remains incomplete. Yes, they nail today’s Left quite well, but they don’t recognize the racial element of its bogus charges. They don’t bring up the fact that of all the people calling for recompense for historic injustices, the Canadian Indians should be the last in line. The depravity and cruelty which those people had inflicted upon their own kind in the past had no limit. They were practically living in a state of permanent warfare with each other. We know this because Catholic missionaries arriving in Canada in the seventeenth century lived among them — the Huron and Algonquin, mostly — and described it in their writings.

I recently reviewed a fascinating book called Saints of the American Wilderness by the Reverend John A. O’Brien, which chronicles the lives and deaths of eight Catholic martyrs who attempted to convert and civilize the savage tribes of Canada centuries ago. It provides us with passage after passage of Indian-on-Indian atrocity — and these need to be remembered if we are to accurately assess today’s bruhaha over non-existent graves. Here is a choice example:

The Indian population [Jacques] Cartier had found in Montreal and Quebec in 1535 had vanished by the opening of the next century. In its stead was another race, widely different in language and customs. In the region that is now New York State, the Iroquois were rising to a ferocious vitality. Only the presence of Europeans prevented them from subjecting, absorbing, or exterminating all other Indian communities east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio.

And another:

Although the Hurons belonged to the broad family of Iroquois, they were attacked by no nation so ferociously and incessantly as by the main Iroquois nation; and in the story of the Jesuit missions they will be treated quite distinctly from the parent family.

And another:

In that initial battle with the French, the Iroquois learned the lesson of the deadly effectiveness of firearms. Through the Dutch at Albany in 1615, they supplied themselves with guns and quickly inaugurated a systemic war of conquest or extermination against all the surrounding tribes, particularly those in league with the French.

And another:

While waiting there, [Isaac] Jogues had a glimpse of Indian savagery that made him shudder. A flotilla of Algonquins came down the river, singing and banging their paddles against the sides of their birchbark canoes. Twenty-eight scalp-locks fluttered from upright poles, and in one boat a captive Iroquois Indian stood shouting defiance. As soon as he stepped ashore, the Algonquins — men, women, and children — leaped upon him. They beat him with clubs, cut him with knives, bit off his fingers, thrust flaming torches against his flesh, and rammed one down his throat.

And another:

The Iroquois were willing to sign a treaty of peace with the French, but they expressed implacable hatred of the Hurons and Algonquins and would be content with nothing short of their complete extermination.

(And I haven’t even reached page 40 yet. I could keep going.)

This last example is particularly moving since it comes from the lips of one of the saints themselves, Jean de Brébeuf, when he was addressing some neophytes just arriving from France:

You must realize that our lives depend upon a single thread. We are told to expect death every hour and be prepared for it, no matter where we are in the world; that applies here particularly. . . . The malice of the savages gives us special cause for almost perpetual fear; a malcontent my burn you down or may cleave your head open in some lonely spot. Then, too, we are responsible for the sterility or the fecundity of the earth, under the penalty of our lives. We are the cause of droughts; if we cannot make rain, they speak of nothing less than murdering us.

This actually happened to poor Brébeuf, who in 1649 endured four hours of torture at the hands of the Iroquois before attaining sainthood. Wanna hear what the Iroquois did to him? In my review I was loath to reprint O’Brien’s harrowing account of the ordeal out of pure disgust (and sympathy for those Indians who didn’t behave in this manner and don’t behave dishonestly today), but now that the descendants of Brébeuf’s murderers are banging the atrocity drum against the comparatively innocent white man, I have changed my mind.

Gloves are now off, ladies and gentlemen:

• They “hacked him with hatchets and knives and stabbed him with javelin heads.”


• They “cut away his lower lip and thrust a red-hot iron down his throat.”


• They “hung a collar of six red-hot hatchets that reached over his shoulder.”


• They “attached resinous bark about his thighs and waist and kindled it until he was a living torch.”


• They “poured a kettle of scalding water slowly over his head.”


• They “cut strips of flesh from his legs and arms and ate them before his eyes.”


• They “cut off his nose, sliced off his upper lip, pulled out his tongue and hacked a piece off it.”

Here is how O’Brien describes Jean de Brébeuf’s violent demise:

They dragged Brébeuf from the fire to the torture platform, and there they performed the last rites in honor of Areskoui. They hacked off the charred feet, tore off his scalp, and cut out his heart. This they devoured, and they drank his blood, thinking to imbibe some of his invincible courage. A chief raised his tomahawk over the head of Brébeuf and split the jaw in two.

While it’s nice that the Ace of Spades and other center-Right influencers are not afraid to call out today’s Native American activists for their vicious, self-serving dishonesty, they should also realize that Native Americans, with their blood-drenched history, are far more guilty of anti-Indian atrocity than the whites are. This is not just according to John O’Brien, but is also according to the archeological record as uncovered by Lawrence Keeley in his indispensable War Before Civilization. So if today’s Indians are so concerned about past atrocities, why are they not crying blood-red rivers over the barbaric Iroquois-Huron wars of the seventeenth century, to say nothing of all the other Indian-on-Indian atrocities we know about?

They’re not, because neither the Iroquois nor the Huron nor any other Indian is white. The unscrupulous descendants of such people target and victimize whites today in order to take advantage of the high moral character that only whites seem to possess in large numbers. Only white people can be made to feel guilty over things they didn’t do. Only white people can be made to feel guilty over things their ancestors didn’t do. And from that guilt springs free money, influence, and power that non-whites are quick to gobble up like the hot blood of a dying saint. The more they take advantage, the more free stuff comes their way. And the more free stuff they get, the more power they gain. This is why they burn churches.

So the next time Native American activists or their Leftist allies accuse whites of past atrocities, whites should tell them to shut up — or, even better, to hurl their accusations at a mirror.

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