Can We Talk About Those Unmarked Graves? | Frances Widdowson

Host Sean Rasmussen sits down with political scientist Frances Widdowson to dive deep into the controversy surrounding the Kamloops unmarked graves. They explore how the initial claims unfolded, why the story became a national—and international—scandal, and the complexities around truth, reconciliation, and the so-called “Aboriginal industry” in Canada. From competing narratives about what happened in Kamloops to the challenges facing free speech and academic freedom, this episode asks: Are we really having an honest conversation about Canada’s past?

Curious about the facts, the fallout, and what’s next for Indigenous policy and public discourse? Tune in for an eye-opening discussion that questions mainstream narratives and calls for real truth-seeking in our national debates.

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Summary of the episode

Blog Post: Viewpoints Podcast Recap – “Can We Talk About Those Unmarked Graves?” with Frances Widdowson

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In this thought-provoking episode of the Viewpoints podcast, host Sean Rasmussen sits down with political scientist Dr. Frances Widdowson to tackle one of the most sensitive and controversial issues in recent Canadian discourse: the story of the unmarked graves announced at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

Setting the Stage: Why This Conversation Matters

Sean opens the episode by stating his motivation: mainstream media has shied away from critical conversations on the Kamloops unmarked graves narrative, and he believes in offering a platform for less-heard perspectives—those that challenge orthodoxy and prompt deeper questions about Canada’s political and cultural narratives.

Frances Widdowson is uniquely placed to comment. With thirty years’ experience studying Indigenous affairs in Canada—including in-the-field policy work and co-authoring the book Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry—she’s now developing a documentary that questions the claims around the Kamloops grave site.

What Sparked Widdowson’s Interest?

Early in her career, Frances worked for the Northwest Territories government, where she saw firsthand how Aboriginal policy shaped (and sometimes distorted) policy development. She describes discovering an “Aboriginal industry”—a network of consultants, bureaucrats, and legal advocates who, in her view, funnel vast resources into bureaucratic structures rather than supporting marginalized Indigenous populations directly.

The Kamloops Announcement and Its Fallout

Sean and Frances recount the sequence of events in spring 2021, when media headlines blared news of the “confirmation of the remains of 215 children” at Kamloops, with claims fueled by ground-penetrating radar (GPR) findings and oral histories. The emotional press releases and high-profile media coverage (including the New York Times declaring the discovery of a “mass grave”) led to national and international uproar.

Frances recalls the climate of the time—the overlap with the COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd protests—suggesting a heightened susceptibility to collective shame and outrage. She also describes how skepticism or even nuance on this topic quickly became taboo, as evidenced by her own professional consequences at Mount Royal University, where she ultimately lost her job after voicing skepticism and using satire to comment on the discourse.

What Does the Evidence Actually Say?

Frances outlines that, years later, no forensic excavation has uncovered actual remains matching the original 215 claim. She points to documentation research identifying about 49 deaths associated with the Kamloops school, nearly all with known causes and burial locations unrelated to the claimed mass grave. She also highlights that ground-penetrating radar can indicate disturbed soil, but not confirm human remains, and that oral testimony—while culturally significant—should be approached carefully in the context of historical accuracy.

Different Ways of Knowing and The Nature of “Truth”

A key philosophical thread in the episode is the clash between Enlightenment notions of universal truth and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s valorization of Indigenous oral traditions and subjective truth. Frances respects the cultural need for meaning in tradition (whether Indigenous or settler) but warns that when subjective experience becomes the sole arbiter of truth, it erodes the possibility of solving real social problems.

The Media and Academic Response: A Case Study in Moral Panic?

The hosts discuss how journalism and academia have been swept up in the “moral panic” surrounding Kamloops—with dissenting academics like Frances being marginalized, and journalists abandoning objectivity in favor of activism. Frances laments the decline of open debate and the increasing pressure to silence uncomfortable questions—both in universities and in public discourse.

Where Does This Leave Us?

Frances argues for returning to a truth-seeking process, even when—and especially when—it’s uncomfortable. She’s critical of how funds routed through what she calls the “Aboriginal industry” rarely reach those most in need, instead supporting bloated bureaucracies and leadership circles. Ultimately, she believes that only by facing facts—not narratives—can Canada move towards meaningful reconciliation and social improvement.

Looking Forward

Frances is currently working on a documentary titled “Uncovering the Grave Error at Kamloops,” seeking to lay out the timeline, the players, and the processes behind the Kamloops story with investigative rigor, despite institutional pressures to the contrary.

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Final Thoughts

This episode is not an easy listen, but it’s a necessary one for anyone interested in how societies handle uncomfortable truths, media responsibility, and the ongoing quest for reconciliation in Canada. The nuanced, sometimes provocative conversation between Sean and Frances reminds us that healing and progress require both empathy and a deep commitment to objective truth.

To follow Frances Widdowson’s work or support her upcoming documentary, visit Woke Academy.

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If you value viewpoint diversity and critical conversations, subscribe to the Viewpoints podcast for more episodes like this. Full details and contact info at viewpointspodcast.ca.

Transcript (Note, generated by AI, so there may be mistakes)

Frances Widdowson [00:00:00]:
Yes. So this is a shift. So the way we’re talking now, we’re operating in a enlightenment universal truth kinda framework. So, you know, we’re seeing it and it doesn’t matter if you’re indigenous, I’m indigenous, whatever. We’re all humans with our rationality, and and we’re figuring this out. And we’re gonna come to a better understanding that everyone can agree to. So that’s one thing. What what’ll happen in this kind of discussion usually is now we’re gonna shift to the truth and reconciliation commissions understanding of truth, which is relative truth. So truth is what I believe to be true, especially if I’m indigenous.

Sean Rasmussen [00:00:47]:
This is Viewpoints, a deeper look into the ideas that shape our politics and culture. Break free from the orthodoxies of mainstream media and hear diverse perspectives from interesting people across the political spectrum. Welcome to Viewpoints. I’m Sean Rasmussen. With me today is doctor Francis Widdesen, a political scientist who has spent her career investigating the politics and ideologies of indigenous affairs in Canada. She’s currently working on a documentary about the Kamloops’ unmarked graves controversy, which is what we’re gonna be talking about today. Frances Widdesen, welcome to Viewpoints.

Frances Widdowson [00:01:28]:
Thanks for having me on.

Sean Rasmussen [00:01:30]:
I’m really excited to do this interview because I’ve been wanting to do it this topic ever since I started the the podcast. The viewpoint that we’re gonna be going over today, which is a bit critical of some of the mainstream understandings of this issue, just haven’t been getting any air, no airtime. And I really feel like it’s important to to have that. So so thanks for coming on and talking about this.

Frances Widdowson [00:01:54]:
Yes. It was very important. And now with the election and the situation with Aaron Gunn trying to have him removed as a candidate and Dallas Brody being pushed pushed out of the conservatives in in British Columbia. It’s coming to the forefront as to being able to discuss it anyway.

Sean Rasmussen [00:02:15]:
I thought maybe we could start off and just talking a little bit about you and your interests. Was there something in particular that got you interested initially in indigenous affairs back in the day? Can you remember anything?

Frances Widdowson [00:02:25]:
Yes. It was a very specific, actually. So I, in order to work for the government, moved to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories because I had a friend who told me that this was a a a good place to get your start if you if you didn’t have any experience. And in the Northwest Territories, it is, Aboriginal policy is very significant, much more significant than you would see it in other areas because the the Aboriginal population is a majority was majority at that time because Nunavut was part of the territory. So not exactly sure what the breakdown is. So Aboriginal policy would infuse every aspect of policy development. And when I was there, I met Albert Howard, who was a consultant working in a number of different areas, but also worked for Aboriginal groups. And so with my government, kind of experience and his consultancy kind of experience, we figured out that it was the Aboriginal industry that was driving the policy development in Northwest Territories, which is Albert Howard was actually part of the Aboriginal industry. He was an innocent member. He thought that he was helping Aboriginal people. But what the what the Aboriginal industry is is it’s essentially a non indigenous element that siphons money away from the marginalized Aboriginal population by having bureaucratic processes and legal grievances being manufactured. So people often wonder why there’s billions of dollars going into Aboriginal policy every year, and the conditions in many Aboriginal communities are terrible. And that’s because of the role that the Aboriginal industry plays in this policy development. And so when I saw that and when we were talking about that, we thought it would be a good idea to write a book about that situation, which hadn’t really been analyzed, and that resulted eventually in the in our coauthored book, Disrobing the Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation. And the unmarked graves aspect, if you look at it, you can see the Aboriginal industry behind everything that’s happened with respect to

Sean Rasmussen [00:04:37]:
Interesting. I haven’t really heard that term, the Aboriginal industry before. So it’s interesting to hear about that perspective and understand that there’s a kind of machinery going on there that may not be to the best interests of of indigenous people, but also Canadians just more broadly speaking too. Yep. And over over time, like, you’ve been studying these these issues now for, like, probably close to twenty years.

Frances Widdowson [00:05:00]:
Thirty years.

Sean Rasmussen [00:05:02]:
Have you noticed any sort of evolution in the issues or an evolution in your thinking about those issues?

Frances Widdowson [00:05:09]:
So my thinking hasn’t the the framework, which is the framework of uneven combined development, which was actually a a a theory developed by Leon Trotsky. So it’s not a it’s not a right wing theory. It’s a left wing theory. And that often gets confused because of all the weird things that are happening politically. So that that’s the framework. I I I guess I’m I’m a little bit more concerned about, what would be conservative idea of people’s obtaining meaning from the traditions that they’ve held for a long period of time. So I might be more a little bit more sensitive to that, similar to what George Orwell. George Orwell was very much concerned about the liberal position of just and probably to some extent, the historical materialist position of just eradicating old traditions. Like, the traditions had to be justified, and if they couldn’t be justified, we shouldn’t be too worried if they were going to be erased by more rational kind of mechanisms.

Sean Rasmussen [00:06:18]:
Okay. So and the traditions you’re talking about are both the indigenous traditions, but also, European Canadian traditions. Is that what you’re saying?

Frances Widdowson [00:06:25]:
Yeah. So all all traditions. So I’m a it’s sort of an atheist, very rational thinker, and people’s beliefs if they’re rational, historically, I would have thought those should just really be eradicated because they’re irrational and and so on. But now I would be a bit more sympathetic to the idea that things have lasted for a long period of time, and you have to be sensitive to maybe those are wound up with the way in which people obtain meaning in the world. Like, that’s and I I’m I’m kind of open to that. I’m I’m I’m I’m sympathetic to both positions. But before, I would have been much more hardcore rationalist kind of thinking about

Sean Rasmussen [00:07:13]:
it. Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [00:07:13]:
Not been very sympathetic about it. But now I’m I’m a bit more cautious, I guess, because I I’m sort of seeing a lot of problems with irrationality that have come from the destruction of traditions. And there’s a number of different issues that are like that. It’s interesting. The default I can’t remember what the name of it is, but, people like James Lindsay have talked about this where, you know, people have a a religious sensibility. And if you don’t go with the traditional religions, they’ll invent more pernicious newer ones.

Sean Rasmussen [00:07:51]:
Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [00:07:51]:
Then the what’s called wokeism is often seen as is is hypothesized by some to be due to the destruction of traditional religions. And now we have this new irrationality, which is which is far worse than some of the more milder forms of Christianity would be argued. But I I don’t know because I’m an atheist, so I don’t accept the belief system. Like, I don’t I don’t think the beliefs are true. But at the same time, we’re we’re a species. We’re a species that has a whole bunch of different factors that affect us, and, it it’s something that I’m I’m I’ve thought a lot more about in the last ten years than I would have thought about, you know, thirty years ago.

Sean Rasmussen [00:08:37]:
I think classical liberals and rationalists around are are grappling with this right now because of the the surgeon in both the people looking for meaning and finding it in these weird belief systems. Yep. For sure. So I wanna move on now to the to the main topic, which is the Kamloops controversy. And I wanted to set the stage for people because I don’t I feel like somehow this got memory hold a little bit. I was just thinking back to when this was announced, and and so I look back at the timelines. So we were in the thick of COVID lockdowns, and there was all kinds of turmoil and protests around the George Floyd killing.

Frances Widdowson [00:09:20]:
Mhmm.

Sean Rasmussen [00:09:20]:
And then just just kind of around that time frame, the news that this newly discovered unmarked graves in Kamloops, British Columbia residential school area came out, and it quickly became this national and international scandal. Do you can you remember anything else about the time that sort of takes you back to that that place?

Frances Widdowson [00:09:42]:
Yeah. So I I was at Mount Royal University at the time, and we were just coming out of COVID. So so 02/2020 was a George Floyd thing, but that kind of softened everyone up for being inclined to be outraged about any kind of thing where there was some kind of hint of racism happening and so on. So we had all that happen in 02/2020. We were just coming out of this in 02/2021. And then we got this announcement in February, and I remember it very vividly. And one year before that in September 2020, that’s when Mount Royal University passed a motion in general faculties council, which is the main the body that makes academic decisions for the university. So it’s, it’s got administrators on it, but it’s it’s supposed to be run by professors. And they voted to declare the residential schools to be genocidal. So they voted on that.

Sean Rasmussen [00:10:50]:
Is this pre like, this is before the the Yeah. On our graves are found? Okay.

Frances Widdowson [00:10:55]:
Yeah. It was. So so I was already thinking about this issue in a very serious way. And as well, I was involved because of I was being mobbed at the time by about 40 faculty members who are trying to push me out of Mount Royal. And I at the time, I turned my Twitter account into a satirical character, Frances McGrath, who was modeled on Andrew Doyle’s character, Titania McGrath. And I was satirizing the comparison between the residential schools and the holocaust. So and this is what got me fired, is that satire was what got me fired. So I was heavily into this already. Yeah. And then this announcement came, and, of course, I was being kind of, castigated for now you’re silent because the like, here we have evidence of genocide. This all these children who have been murdered. And and, one of my colleagues, Gabrielle Lindstrom, who was the main instigator for getting me fired, who eventually, filed a harassment complaint against me. And I was pushed out of Mount Royal, and then immediately after I was fired, she was rehired. So, you know, we can’t say for sure that’s why I was fired, but she left Mount Royal because she said I made her feel unsafe. And then when I was fired, she was immediately hired back, so that seemed to be connected.

Sean Rasmussen [00:12:25]:
Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [00:12:25]:
She said yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Just a bit of

Sean Rasmussen [00:12:27]:
a I’m sorry. As I said, I read a really interesting piece in that in a book, an essay by Bruce Gilley about your case. And that the essay was called how a professor was canceled by academic Stalinists on campus.

Frances Widdowson [00:12:40]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was, that was pretty good. That one that that that goes into it in quite a lot of detail. Anyway, Gabriel Lindstrom on her Twitter account said, or Gabriel Weaselhead as she’s now called, that was her maiden name. So she’s gone back to her maiden name. After hearing about the murder of 215 children, I was crying, and I phoned my parents and so on. So she had this this big thing. So I was I was already kind of thinking, and I and I was thinking about this, and I was I didn’t think it sounded, it sounded suspicious to me right now. And then I was talking with my other colleagues, Brian Giesbrecht. We had a we had an event. We held an event called, can we discuss those unmarked graves with Paul Vemonez, Rodney Clifton, and Brian Giesbrecht in February? I think it was July 10. And the dates are very important because on July 15, that’s when we first heard that the remains had not been found and there had been anomalies on the GPR by Sarah Bollier, who is the, GPR expert who did the survey for the ban. So this was before that happened, and we were talking about what coulda happened there. And Giesbrecht said, there’s a whole bunch of abandoned cemeteries across the country, so that’s a possibility that it’s a cemetery that’s been abandoned. But, of course, the the, anomalies were in the apple orchard, and there is a cemetery on the reserve where, you know, children who died at the residential school presumably are buried. They’re buried in other communities as well as other community cemeteries. But there’s a whole bunch of unmarked graves in that cemetery on the Kamloops Reserve. So Yeah. And that was kinda the date that all these things were happening, and I’m still kinda piecing through the timeline on this because the question now is, was it just a mistake, or was it an orchestrated deception?

Sean Rasmussen [00:14:39]:
So what was the initial claim, and what was right or wrong about the claim? And can we just go into that

Frances Widdowson [00:14:47]:
a a little bit? So the original claim was in a press release of 05/27/2021. It’s still available. You can look at it on the Internet. It was very emotional and said that, you know, the band is announcing the confirmation, and this is the exact wording, the confirmation of the remains of 215 children. And then it says in a paragraph later, some were as young as three years old. So those were the two main claims that were made in the press release. And then later on, we heard about some and I’m and I’m not sure well, I don’t think it was in the press release. It was in another there’s another press release on July 15, which provided more details.

Sean Rasmussen [00:15:34]:
Okay. Now as part of that claim, did they give evidence or reasons for saying this?

Frances Widdowson [00:15:40]:
They said the null so there’s the knowledge keepers. Our elders have known this for for years.

Sean Rasmussen [00:15:49]:
Okay.

Frances Widdowson [00:15:50]:
And g p GPR was mentioned. So I think they might have even said confirmation by g p r ground penetrating radar. So ground penetrating radar was in there. It wasn’t a major part. It was mentioned.

Sean Rasmussen [00:16:03]:
Okay.

Frances Widdowson [00:16:04]:
But it was definitely said it was confirmed. And then The New York Times, which was the major news outlet, said a mass grave had been discovered. And The New York Times to this day will not remove that from their web.

Sean Rasmussen [00:16:18]:
Okay. They haven’t formed a retraction yet on that one.

Frances Widdowson [00:16:21]:
No. And they won’t they said that they have evidence of this, and it it is perhaps Austin is who’s the the the journalist who wrote that story claimed to have met two people who said that they had dug graves. So but we don’t know the names of those people, so we haven’t been able to verify what they’re talking about.

Sean Rasmussen [00:16:45]:
So after those claims were made, like, those are pretty serious claims, obviously.

Frances Widdowson [00:16:49]:
Mhmm.

Sean Rasmussen [00:16:50]:
And how did it go from that claim to sort of being truth? Was there, like, a forensic investigation to investigate this the area and to do, you know, excavation or anything like that?

Frances Widdowson [00:17:03]:
So this is where the the it’s probable deception. So we thought when this press release was released on May 27, that that just came out and it was, like, announced, but that’s not what happened. So the the press release was embargoed for two days. There was a lot of publicists, consultants involved in the information. They got the journalists who were friendly. There’s about five or six of them to to get the press release that was shared with other people. So people knew about this for a couple of days before it happened. And one of those journalists was who was part of the inner circle was Tanya Talaga, who’s written about this in her book, The Knowing. Anyway, Rachel Coy is is the main publicist who is controlling everything. As well, the RCMP was starting to investigate, but Marie Sinclair Tanya Talaga went to Marie Sinclair and told him about this because there were some questions that were being asked by the office of the Privy Council in Ottawa about the numbers. They were not they were starting to be skeptical about this. And so she got in touch with Marie Sinclair, and Marie Sinclair pressured. It’s was started to put pressure on various elements, so the RCMP backed off.

Sean Rasmussen [00:18:28]:
And So how did Marie Sinclair what what kind of pressure could could Marie Sinclair use in that case?

Frances Widdowson [00:18:35]:
He’s talking about it in a parliamentary committee. He was mentioning it. We’re not exactly sure what hap he’s just mentioning that the RCMP was being very heavy handed in their approach and questioning sir this this lady. He referred to her as this lady. And, you know, if you’re gonna announce that 215 children are in a in a clandestine burial, right, obviously, the RCMP are going to question the GPR expert because she has the you know, whatever. So, anyway, so it’s like this. They’re doing they’re they’re being aggressive. They’re the and so that’s what that’s what he’s saying. And then the RCMP just said, okay. We’re gonna back away and let the band take the lead. So we don’t know because and he’s dead, of course, now, so we can’t question him as to what he did. But he was involved, and and we wanna talk to the RCMP too to find out. So a lot of this is kind of we just have these snippets of information, and we have to be careful, obviously, not to not to overreach and say, maybe he just made this announcement in the this parliamentary committee, and he and someone watched it or something. Or maybe the RCMP was being a bit nervous about doing this anyway. And as well, the RCMP if I said to the RCMP, I’ve got you know, there’s bodies of 10 children buried in my backyard. They’re gonna ask me, well, what evidence do you have for that? And I’m gonna go, well, I’ve just heard stories about this from my aunts and uncles about this. And they’re gonna go, well, we just don’t go and dig up stuff just because your aunts and uncles without any you know, who are the peep who are the children who are that’s the other thing that’s important to keep in mind is that not one parent has said that their child never came home from the residential schools. So who are the 215 children or, as it turned out, 200? So Sarah Boulier and okay. So I’m getting there there’s a whole bunch of

Sean Rasmussen [00:20:39]:
There’s a lot of detail there. Yes. And I’m just wanna I just kinda wanna cover the basics of the initial claim because I know that we kinda went in Canada from zero to a hundred in terms of national shame. Yeah. Yeah. All kinds of all kinds of stuff. Different media, like, media went crazy over this. Yeah. So what you’re saying is there wasn’t a forensic investigation to No. Go into the ground and and actually look for these They’ve

Frances Widdowson [00:21:04]:
never done it. They’ve there’s never there has never been anything, and and they received they they requested 9,200,000 to to do the investigation, and they haven’t done any any excavation. So that’s the first step is you need like they did in Pine Creek, which was in a church basement. They went and excavated. They brought in the the archeology. You have to do this carefully.

Sean Rasmussen [00:21:31]:
Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [00:21:32]:
And they have done it carefully and that they’ve cordoned off the site, and they have security there to make sure no one goes in there. So that’s good. They’ve now cordoned off the crime scene for four years

Sean Rasmussen [00:21:43]:
Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [00:21:43]:
The supposed to crime scene. Now you have to bring in people to make sure things are excavated in a very careful way so you you do it by layers and you can because you might have bodies buried on top of one another or something like that. And you wanna know which bodies were put in first and you wanna have the surrounding things. It’s a it’s a scientific process. So there’s not not been they’ve cordoned off the site, and that’s it. They haven’t done anything else.

Sean Rasmussen [00:22:12]:
Okay. Okay. So so it’s four years on, and so, really, the evidence on the ground hasn’t changed much. Right? We we know what people said maybe more now, but we don’t know what’s under the ground yet. Is that is

Frances Widdowson [00:22:26]:
that true? Well, we know more like, what happened was when the announcement was made. So there was a preannouncement and the postannouncement in terms of people’s testimonies. The preannouncement and this is not in the press release or anything. This is done by the research of the group, Nina Green, who is the major researcher on this matter, who actually contacted Brian Giesbrecht. She contacted me, and then I put her in touch with Brian Giesbrecht and Rodney Clifton. This is mostly her research. This is a big figure in this story, and I’m not sure if you’ve heard of him. His name is Kevin Annette. He was a minister a United Church minister, I believe in Port Alberni and got and got defrocked because he was telling all these wild wild tales about the church murdering residential school students. He worked with alcoholics on the Lower East Side in Vancouver and was doing these healing kinda circles with them. So all these people are mixed up with Kevin Annette. Anyway, Annette wrote a number of books and did a document what he called a documentary in 02/2007 called Unrepentant. Through Annette’s connections, we had two eyewitnesses of burials at Kamloops, Billy Coombs and Jesse Jules. So those are the two and and Jesse Jules is not clear because you only hear about Jules through Annette’s words. Whereas Coombs, we actually have footage of Coombs talking about this on the film unrepentant. Okay. So that’s before the announcement. That’s all we heard about, quote, unquote, murders. Then post 02/2021, we had a whole bunch of other stories that started to come out about it. So Okay. And this is important because and this is what people have to realize is it’s possible that people are lying about this because of the money that’s involved in everything. That’s possible. But equally likely and probably more likely is what’s called misremembering, where you start hearing all these stories and you’re a bit kind of muddled yourself, and you might have substance abuse problems and whatever. And these memories of other people or or supposed memories get implanted in your mind. So if you’re watching Billy Coombs talk about stuff on unrepentant, then you start to develop the memories of of Billy Coombs as being your own memories. So so this is Yeah.

Sean Rasmussen [00:25:00]:
So there’s reason. So you’re kind of, like, just looking at the whether or not the these claims can be, I don’t know, trusted or whatever. Yeah. If we wanna flip so so, basically, the the claim is that that there has been a oral tradition of stories around this, and then ground penetrating radar helped validate those stories. Can we turn it around now and just kinda steel man the other side a little bit

Frances Widdowson [00:25:27]:
Yes.

Sean Rasmussen [00:25:27]:
In terms of just giving the the best possible representation of

Frances Widdowson [00:25:32]:
Yes. Of

Sean Rasmussen [00:25:32]:
what the those people’s making those claims are?

Frances Widdowson [00:25:35]:
Yes. So we have forty nine deaths that have been documented by the new National Center for Truth and Reconciliation. Perhaps from I’m not I think I anyway, it’s a it’s a a list of the it was fifty one, but the it was a double counting. So

Sean Rasmussen [00:25:54]:
Fifty one what?

Frances Widdowson [00:25:55]:
Fifty one deaths of children during this time at the residential schools. Forty nine. It turned out to be forty nine, and this is done research done by Jacques Riard and Nina Green. Twenty five of those have been were rep we know we have the death certificates for them, and they were they died not at the school. They died in accidents. They died in the hospitals and so on. The remaining 24, we have some of those death certificates, and those children did die at the school and are buried in various cemeteries. But there’s about 10 we don’t have death certificates for. So we don’t know who where those children are buried or anything. So it’s possible. I the the research has to be done on this, and and you have to if you’re a family member, you can get those death certificates from vital statistics. If you’re not, you can’t. So whoever those you know, that that can be stuff that’s done. So those unknown people where they’re buried, you know, it’s possible they’re buried in the orchard. Like, because it’s not specific. Like, the those are the numbers we’re talking about that that would make sense in terms of the 200. So it’s not first of all, it’s not two fifteen fifteen anymore. It’s two hundred because Sarah Boulier included 15 false positives from where the archeology department from Simon Fraser had done shovel test pits in that area. So when someone saw her findings, they said, hey. What those those 15 of those are from there. So she downgraded the two fifteen to 200 in her July 15 presentation.

Sean Rasmussen [00:27:46]:
So Okay.

Frances Widdowson [00:27:47]:
The other Yeah. A 90 that could be there, I I don’t know what the claim would be as to who those children would be.

Sean Rasmussen [00:27:58]:
Okay. So you’re still kinda coming at it from just, like, the facts point of view. Yeah. I guess there’s this underlying philosophy about trusting the oral tradition and different ways of knowing and things like that that that is part of a sensitivity around indigenous ways of knowing indigenous traditions and and how they transfer information from generation to generation. Yeah. And and I guess that’s sort of what is part of the claim too. Is that

Frances Widdowson [00:28:31]:
Yes. So this is a shift. So the way we’re talking now, we’re operating in a enlightenment universal truth kinda framework. So, you know, we’re seeing it and it doesn’t matter if you’re indigenous, I’m indigenous, whatever. We’re all humans with our rationality, and and we’re figuring this out. And we’re gonna come to a better understanding that everyone can agree to. So that’s one thing. What what’ll happen in this kind of discussion usually is now we’re gonna shift to the truth and reconciliation commissions understanding of truth, which is relative truth. So truth is what I believe to be true, especially if I’m indigenous. I don’t I don’t know what this holds if if you’re not indigenous. But certainly if you’re indigenous, truth is what you believe to be true. And so truth is your own way you make sense in the world. And so all these knowledge keepers, this is how they are living in their culture and their living lived experience, and it’s incredibly important for their views to be affirmed for them to feel that they are they matter and that their humanity is being, respected and so on. And so, therefore, if a knowledge keeper tells you that there are 215 children buried in the apple orchard, you must affirm that if you want to have reconciliation. And if you don’t affirm that, reconciliation will not happen because you are not validating those truths that they have. Like, that’s the kind of thing.

Sean Rasmussen [00:30:18]:
So Okay. I think a lot of people, a lot of Canadians might actually be sympathetic to that line of reasoning. Right?

Frances Widdowson [00:30:24]:
Yes. And in my view, this will not work. Well, first of all, we’re being like, we’re shifting from one one frame of truth to another all the time. And so you think you’re talking about the and that’s how I I don’t think I think the other thing, people are entitled to believe whatever they believe, but don’t if you’re expecting me to accept it, then I that’s a different matter. So but what’s happening is that people are telling me how important this is that I validate them and so on. I say, well, I can validate you in the sense of saying you are entitled to believe whatever you believe, but I don’t have to validate you in in the sense of saying that I accept your belief to be true. But we we have this constantly happening. What you find when you’re and that’s what my problem was at Mount Royal, right, is that I just would not play this game. And, of course, I was this monster who was going around, you know, denying the humanity of the knowledge keepers, and I was making people feel unsafe and all this kind of stuff. And, this is very just I think this, in the end, is just a form of manipulation that’s going on. Like, it’s not it’s not very sincere, and it’s it’s it’s really totalitarian in its context. And if we’re gonna do this, we will not have a civilization anymore. We we we have a serious problem on our hand, and and this is kind of the fight that we have to have. And I don’t think that it’s it’s going to be beneficial to anyone to go on this, you know, I have my truth, and you have to validate it because of the history of colonialism and all these other kinds of arguments because you know? And and we and we heard this with indigenous, people saying after the announcement was made at Kamloops, there was this terrible trauma that just sweeps swept through the the the Aboriginal population because they all believed that there was these murdered children in this apple orchard. Well, if that’s the case, wouldn’t we be moving along a better path if we were to say, hey. You know, that was a bit of a crazy time, but that’s there’s really no evidence to suggest that that’s the key. So, therefore, you don’t have to feel that trauma anymore about there being these murdered children in the apple orchard. So Mhmm. Unless it’s a dishonest ploy to get money, which, I think this is part of the story here. It’s it’s it’s not the whole story, but it’s definitely part of it. And, you know, I just I I don’t I think that the truth giving up on the truth as a universal, there’s gonna be terrible consequences to this. And we are seeing this now, and we can either try to right the ship and get back on some attempt to actually solve problems, or we can avoid the problems and do this kind of hand wringing and condescending approach where we tell indigenous people that because they’re upset, we’re just gonna agree with everything that they say. You know? Like, this we’re in a terrible situation, which has been unfolding now for a number of years, but we’re we’re coming to the we’re coming to the point where we we really cannot function anymore with how people talking about these incidents.

Sean Rasmussen [00:33:56]:
I mean, it doesn’t seem like like the truth about what’s in the ground there doesn’t necessarily mean we have to disrespect indigenous people or, you know, necessarily mean we have to disrespect indigenous people or to sort of disrespect their traditions or it doesn’t seem like it’s necessarily oppressive to actually wanna know what what happened.

Frances Widdowson [00:34:12]:
Well, it depend according to some of these neotribal elites, I’ll call them, which are the the like, there’s ordinary indigenous people, and and we don’t even know what they we just heard our rebel news thing where they mass this guy’s voice and everything, and he’s he’s saying he he’s afraid to speak according to Rebel because of the pressure that he’s gonna get if he comes out. And he he’s saying, you know, that he had a good time there. He he had a he knew, the principal’s the last name was Noonan. He was a really nice guy. You know, there was people who were children there who their family were abusive, so they were in the school. And, anyway, that, you know

Sean Rasmussen [00:34:51]:
So, like, positive experiences of the residential schools as well as the the negative experiences.

Frances Widdowson [00:34:57]:
Yeah. But but the thing is is that we don’t hear because he’s not a in a leadership position, not part of this whole Aboriginal industry thing that’s going on, we don’t hear from people who are in that ordinary Aboriginal position. We hear from the Roseanne Casimirs, the Ted Godfriedsens, the Terry Tighees, all these very well paid Aboriginal leaders who are benefiting from the situation. So they’re framing this as if you say there’s no or or that it’s highly improbable. Let’s just put it that way. It’s highly improbable that there are remains in the apple orchard. If you say that you are denying you are this is oppressive. This is denying our truths. You are disrespecting the knowledge keepers. This kind of barrage of accusations when you can try to be very sympathetic to the terrible conditions that many Aboriginal people are living in and wanting to do something about that, but say, look. The thing about the apple orchard is is highly improbable. Like, you can have those two things, but you can think

Sean Rasmussen [00:36:10]:
of it. To be true. Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [00:36:12]:
But but what but how it’s being framed is that actually, Leah Gazzan. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of Leah Gazzan. No. She is the MP for Winnipeg Centre. She came and spoke in Pearl River on January 20 against what she calls residential school denialism, which is downplaying the harms of the residential schools and spreading this information. And and she is spreading false information at the same time about there being 215 children buried in the apple orchard. She wants to make this illegal, downplaying the she said this was a quote, a direct quote from her. This is not exact. This is a paraphrase. Nothing is more violent than to deny the stories of Aboriginal people and to say you’re lying. That’s what that’s what she says. Now that’s nonsense. How about the death camps in Nazi Germany, Rwanda, people being hacked apart by machetes, the the death squads in Latin America where people are actually, you know, dumped in in mass graves and clandestine burials, all sorts of horrors that have faced us historically, those are way, way, way more well, first of all, it’s not even violent to say you’re lying when someone says a story. Now maybe they’re not lying, so that’s a bit insensitive that it could be miss misremembering. But Billy Coombs, who is the main eyewitness for the Kamloops case, he claimed that, oh, this is through Kevin Annette. So again, we have to be a bit, you know, circumspect about this, that queen Elizabeth in 1964 took 10 children on a picnic with prince Philip and abducted those children. So and it turns out that the queen Elizabeth was not even in Kamloops in 1964. And even if king queen Elizabeth were in Kamloops in 1964, we know what the royal visits are like. They’re just hounded by the press at every moment. How on earth would queen Elizabeth have gone on a picnic with 10 children and abducted those children? That that is really not, not a very, possible scenario. So if I say to Billy Coombs, you know, that I don’t that’s not true. I don’t believe that. Now this is the most violent thing that, you know, I’ve ever done or that that’s ever happened. Like like, this is very hyperbolic, catastrophizing kind of language, which is really manipulative. Like

Sean Rasmussen [00:38:47]:
And it seems to be very effective. Like, it it seems to be running through the institutions, not just with that particular issue, but with a bunch of different issues as well. I know that you’re you do some stuff around, gender ideology as well, but Yeah. It seems to be the same kind of ploy Yep. In a variety of different issues to silence dissent, I guess.

Frances Widdowson [00:39:09]:
Yes. And just to go back to your because I think this is very important, is to to try to give the people who are making this claim the most like, to to try to make the best case that you possibly can. So just steel man this as so the claim is two and not two fifteen. There are 200 remains in the apple orchard or likely to be 200 because of the anomalies. Sarah Bollier would say, and this is the claim that she made, that stuff on the GPR, which she showed us in her presentation, the way those are, you see those on the GPR, is they present like burials. So if you look at the the way they are, it’s not like a rock or anything like that because you can see the shafts and a little dome on top. So there was a there was a thing dug, but what we know now is that there were septic tiles, rows of septic tiles laid in that area in the nineteen twenties. So the question is, does digging a septic tile, does that present the same way as digging a grave would?

Sean Rasmussen [00:40:20]:
Mhmm. Mhmm.

Frances Widdowson [00:40:22]:
The other bizarre thing that’s come out that we just found out from the the footage of the one year anniversary at Kamloops. So they had this big ten hour long recording of speeches and everything that happened in Kamloops in May 2022 is Ted Godfriedson, who’s one of the major players in this story. He was giving a presentation on what had happened, and he talked about Sarah Bollier’s, GPR work. And he said that it was Sarah Bollier who was when she was doing GPR, she told everyone that there was three year olds buried in these graves.

Sean Rasmussen [00:41:01]:
Mhmm.

Frances Widdowson [00:41:02]:
We haven’t heard that from her, so we don’t know. But she thought that what she saw indicated three year olds being buried.

Sean Rasmussen [00:41:12]:
Okay. So, like, not really something you can draw from a GPR study, but she was making these kinds

Frances Widdowson [00:41:17]:
of stuff. Draw you you cannot GPR, you can sort of look at the like, the things she showed us, which were, like, the kind of thing it did look like it was a it was a it was a trench it was a ditch that had been dug, but that’s all we know. So you can’t see anything else from that. And and that’s a very good hit. Like like, often, you can’t even see like, it’s much more it’s it’s not clear.

Sean Rasmussen [00:41:43]:
I guess to to steel man it a little bit more, it seems that the appeal of these types of claims is not even necessarily about the factual truth of this particular location, but but more just the overall terrible experience of the encounter between Europeans and indigenous in our history and the kind of collective guilt that Canadians feel about that time period. That seems to be a very, present thing for people to that sort of the pain of that.

Frances Widdowson [00:42:21]:
That’s a that’s a good point. And I think this is part of it, is is we we don’t really know what to do. So then this this is now gonna get into very controversial ground here.

Sean Rasmussen [00:42:33]:
More controversial.

Frances Widdowson [00:42:35]:
Like, the others is the what I was just saying there, this is just pure, you know, like, truth, like, different views

Sean Rasmussen [00:42:42]:
of truth. Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [00:42:43]:
You know, like, like and and the the failure, the massive failure, that’s that’s really, to me, the bigger story is

Sean Rasmussen [00:42:50]:
is Yeah. I want to get to that actually, the the response, the Canadian response to it. Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [00:42:54]:
Yeah. So the journalists and the academics, and I can I can talk on the academic side because I went I like, I’m a what happened to me is is why we had what what we’re having? We’re still having it on the academic side. You have to be incredibly tough to just say, well, go ahead. Like, well, fire me, fire me. We’ll fight it out, and I will not give you a thousandths of an inch on this. I’ll take it to the Supreme Court of Canada if I have to, but this is nonsense. And what you guys did at Mount Royal University, People are gonna know about this. And I’m not can look at every single document I have, and I’ve done nothing wrong. And you guys have done a lot of terrible things, that kind of thing. Mhmm. So that’s the academic side. But the journalistic side, and Simon Herrgard, who’s my videographer, he was working in for Global News in this time. He’s got footage that he has from it, and his employer was not very enthusiastic. K. He thought it was suspicious himself. He wanted to pursue it, and is like, No, it’s calling. This is very this is very insensitive to ask these questions, you know, like these poor people. And that’s kind of getting into what you’re talking about, which is and this is where we’re at a bit now, is that everyone doesn’t know how to deal with this situation because they can they can go on two paths here. One is the the path of the theory of uneven and combined development.

Sean Rasmussen [00:44:28]:
Sorry. Say that again?

Frances Widdowson [00:44:30]:
The theory of uneven and combined development.

Sean Rasmussen [00:44:33]:
I I don’t know that theory.

Frances Widdowson [00:44:34]:
Okay. This is Leon Trotsky’s theory.

Sean Rasmussen [00:44:37]:
Okay.

Frances Widdowson [00:44:37]:
And that’s the theory, in disrobing the aboriginal industry and my other book, separate but unequal, which is a more academic book looking at in more depth at the theory, the theory of uneven combined development. Anyway, it understands humanity from a cultural evolutionary perspective and argues that hunting and gathering societies are less productive, less complex, and smaller than modern nation states and states that have a much higher surplus and a much more efficient technology. And this results in, knowledge that is more is more, sophisticated and and and understands the world more than the kind of knowledge that exists in hunting and gathering societies. The institutions are based upon principles of what’s called legal rational authority, which is the where you have the office. So the office is what is has authority, not the tradition or traditional authority. So right now, we’re trying to figure out who’s gonna be prime minister of Canada when that let’s say it’s gonna be, Jagmeet Singh is gonna be the prime minister. Now Carney is is the prime minister right now. If Jagmeet Singh becomes prime minister, Carney no longer has authority of of that he has now because he’s no longer that office. That that’s a very advanced way of having authority because it requires a lot of institutional structures. That’s only possible in a modern society. It’s it doesn’t happen in in in hunting and gathering societies. So that’s the theory. When you had European nations come over to North America, there was a meeting of hunting and gathering and late period feudalism with beginning to make the transition to capitalism. So you had highly productive systems coming. And because of that, indigenous people there are certain amount of indigenous culture that got intertwined with the European side, but it was generally the European side dominated. But we still have a problem now with the hunting and gathering elements still being part of the isolated communities, and those people in those isolated communities cannot participate in modern society because they don’t have the cultural development to be able to do this. And Mark Carney’s father, Robert Carney, was talking about this in the cultural retardation kinds of comments, which now everyone is like, oh, that’s just oh, it’s so terrible. And, it’s like, well, that was true, what he was saying. And you might not like it. But, hey. Are we gonna deal with this reality or not? And no one wants to deal with that reality, and they’re they’re they’re anyway, that’s my that’s that’s my view. Now I could be completely wrong on this. The other view is that, no, that’s just totally false and also oppressive and so on.

Sean Rasmussen [00:47:58]:
And colonialist

Frances Widdowson [00:48:00]:
and It’s not got anything to do with race. It’s it’s it’s got to do with the technology that that cultures had. And if you took, and that was kind of the view of the residential schools was if you take very, very young children and put them in the modern context, they will develop just like a a modern person will. So that’s why in the residential schools, they wanted to separate the children from the parents is because they wanted to give them the best chance to be able to become workers and whatever in that new emerging capitalist system. Now maybe that was totally wrong headed because the other side says, no. They’re just as developed. They’re just developed in another kinda way. And if it was all the colonialist oppression that is the problem, and if you just remove that colonialist oppression, those cultures will be able to just function in their own context in a very, very equal way with the modern society. So I think that’s not correct, and that’s that’s not gonna work.

Sean Rasmussen [00:49:00]:
But that’s sort of the prevailing idea, right, like in academia and in actually, a lot of Canadians would say that too. Right?

Frances Widdowson [00:49:06]:
Yeah. And and academia. So I was able to argue the other position for for thirty years, and then, you know, things fell apart in 02/2020. And now it’s like I I can’t be in the university making that argument because it makes Gabrielle Weaselhead feel unsafe. And she has to leave for the University of Calgary, and then, you know, they have to remove me so that she can now come back and and be a professor at Mount Royal. Like, that that’s kinda what’s happened. So my my position as a truth teller, that’s that’s how I saw myself, naively. I I just kept on asking the questions and there’s you know? It’s like, people don’t like this, and they’re getting upset. And, it’s like, well, they can be upset, but I’m here. It’s my duty to tell tell people what I think is true. And now that’s not we don’t allow that anymore.

Sean Rasmussen [00:50:02]:
And also, not just to tell what you think is true, but also to have a dialogue about it, right? To try to find the truth.

Frances Widdowson [00:50:08]:
Yeah, to try to have a Street Epistemology session. And, you know, I can accept that I’m wrong on many things, like I might be, and, you know, show me how I’m wrong, but that’s not what happened. You know, I was just called a racist and told that I was And probably this is gonna be illegal not that long from now if we continue down this path because it just doesn’t To say we have to Our major concern is how indigenous people feel, or the neo tribal elites, not indigenous. We’re only talking to the Rosanne Chasm and the and the and the Ted Godfried since and so on. We’re not talking to this guy who has to hide his voice, who’s talking about things that he experienced because he’s not going to be the one who’s gonna be able to generate money for the Aboriginal industry. That that’s what it’s all about, I think, is that Aboriginal policy is about diverting transfers to the Aboriginal industry. And then the Aboriginal industry looks after all the dysfunction in Aboriginal communities, and and that means that the government doesn’t really have to deal with this anymore. So

Sean Rasmussen [00:51:18]:
Mhmm.

Frances Widdowson [00:51:18]:
That’s part of the story as well.

Sean Rasmussen [00:51:20]:
So what’s that neotribal what what do you call that again?

Frances Widdowson [00:51:23]:
Yeah. So the the process is, and this is in separate but unequaled where I flesh this out. The process is what’s called neotribal renterism, which is Aboriginal what what goes on in Aboriginal communities, which is that the Aboriginal industry, which is these lawyers and consultants, make these arguments for the diversion of funds to these neo tribal elites, which are the leadership. So they’re it’s called a neo tribe because it’s not like Aboriginal groups were before contact. Like, they’re they’ve been influenced by the capitalist system, so they’re much larger. And they’ve got a whole bunch of bureaucratic structures themselves. If you look at the three main Aboriginal organizations in British Columbia, which are, the Union of British Columbia, Indian Chiefs, the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations, and the First Nations Leadership Summit or something like that. So there’s these three groups. They have all the staff and all these p you know? So they are million dollar multimillion dollar funding that’s going into these organizations. They figure out how all the money is gonna be distributed amongst the Aboriginal population. So Okay. It’s renterism because it’s not productive in any way. It’s just a rake off of the money. It they like, they’re they’re not producing anything. So, ideally, in the in the sys in a capitalist system, right, you have a whole bunch of workers who are producing all these products, and then you have people who own those corporations, and they get profits from them. And then that’s kind of the nature of it, and and and so on. And capitalists, right, they they don’t do any work either, but but they’re reinvesting in their system. And but with renderism, it’s just this is what happens with, like, contracts for these Aboriginal organizations. They just rake off 15% off the top.

Sean Rasmussen [00:53:23]:
Okay.

Frances Widdowson [00:53:23]:
So but they don’t do it. Again. Like, they can be And

Sean Rasmussen [00:53:26]:
then you’ve been critical of of the way that that the communities aren’t really being served by this class of people you’re talking about in these

Frances Widdowson [00:53:33]:
Yeah. It’s it’s terrible. It’s a terrible environment. First of all, most of the Aboriginal population doesn’t get any access to any of these this what’s called a circulation economy. So this money, this rake off, they don’t get any of that. So they live in terrible poverty and have nothing. And then you have, like, a privileged group, the neotribal elites that that have most of the money. But the it’s not good for the neotribal elites either. That’s that’s kind of the tragedy is that you’ve got a bunch of people who are not very well educated and don’t really know how to participate, who are being manipulated by the Aboriginal industry. And so they probably suffer from all sorts of feelings of imposter syndrome and so on. Like like, I that’s why they’re so arrogant. The neo tribal elites are unbelievably arrogant. If you’re trying to talk to them, like, look. Here I am. I’m just I’m just trying to figure things out here, and maybe I’m wrong. And I’m just trying to talk to this Aboriginal person as a like, hey. You’re a human being. I’m a human being. Let’s try to figure this out and whatever. And maybe I’m a bit of an asshole, and I shouldn’t be as blunt as I am. And, oh, fair enough. You know? Maybe I’ll just I’ll stop this and okay. But let’s let’s just try and talk. They’ll go, you you don’t tell us what to do. You don’t it’s like, I have no power I have no power at all. Like, I I’m I’m I’m living on I’m I’m lost my job. I’m I’m trying to do some documentaries to maybe contribute to discourse. But if people don’t wanna, you know, contribute to my documentaries, then I’m probably gonna do a really terrible documentary because I I won’t have any funding to do it. And, you know, what what what say do I have in anything? Like, I don’t I don’t have any power. So why would you point your finger at me and tell me that I’m some kind of oppressor or something? And Oh, my dear.

Sean Rasmussen [00:55:29]:
The ideology of the, like, sort of white supremacy and things like that. Right?

Frances Widdowson [00:55:34]:
Yeah. Okay. Well, my ancestors, you know, probably had more more wealth than an indigenous typical indigenous person did, but that doesn’t give me any power in society. The the union of Indian, British Columbia, like Terry Tighe and, Stuart Phillips. So those are the two main and there’s another guy who I just heard about a month ago who’s the head of the first nations. I can’t remember his last name now. There’s those three leaders. Like, they’re they’re trying to seriously wield power and have candidates removed, and they have power. They just got Dallas Brody booted out of the conservatives, and they I don’t think they actually Aaron Gunn’s still standing. And and I’m not a conservative. I’m a socialist. So I I don’t support the conservatives, but I think that Aaron Gunn should be able to say that the residential schools were genocidal. Like, that’s my view. And I don’t think that the Indian chiefs should be able to wield power to have him removed from his position for saying that. Like, that that’s my position. But they’re wielding power, and I, like, I have no say at all. I’m I’m just someone who’s, you know, crying in the from the margins saying, hey. I don’t think this is gonna work very well for our social relations. And it’s not working well for the neo tribal elites because they’re just unbelievably arrogant people who are contributing nothing to society, and they know that deep down. And then their poor brethren who don’t have any access to funds at all are living in terrible conditions. So no one’s benefiting about at this except for the lawyers and and the consultants who, because they’re very sophisticated, they’ve probably been able to justify all of what they do to themselves.

Sean Rasmussen [00:57:30]:
Mhmm. Do you would you think about and have you heard, like, a way forward through these issues? Like, how can how can we move forward as Canadians to kind of find a better balance between the indigenous community and the

Frances Widdowson [00:57:44]:
Well, the first thing is in order to solve a problem, you have to understand cause. That can only be done through a truth seeking process. That’s the first thing on the agenda. And because of what’s happened over the last well, I guess it’s been unfolding since the nineteen sixties, We can’t do that at all anymore.

Sean Rasmussen [00:58:06]:
Because the notions of truth have been eroded. Right?

Frances Widdowson [00:58:09]:
Yes. So that happened in the sixties. So the sixties was when we had the postmodern assault on the universities, and, there was the relativism and that there’s no truth, the idea of no truth. So that kinda got somewhat accepted in the universities, and they’ve been being corroded ever since, and now they’re completely lost. The universities are an absolute disaster, and, I don’t know if they can e even be recovered, but still, one brick at a time, you know, starting with my case at Mount if I do not win my case at Mount Royal University, you know, that that’s just it’s over.

Sean Rasmussen [00:58:50]:
Gonna send a message to a very silencing message to anyone who wants to

Frances Widdowson [00:58:53]:
be disinterred. Already has. And right now, I’ve had to battle every everything, you know, the and the unions are a big part of the problem. Anyway, we’re we’re we’re sorta getting things on a right track now with with my keys, and we’re gonna hopefully go to the Supreme Court of Canada on this one and have all the all the judges and all the everyone write their opinions out so that we can say, no. This is where this went wrong. Right? Like, what happens with professors these days is you get a big settlement. Like, you just get paid off.

Sean Rasmussen [00:59:27]:
Okay.

Frances Widdowson [00:59:27]:
You go away with your millions of dollars and you and then you can’t talk about it because in order to get your millions of dollars, you know, you have to sign a confidentiality agreement. But you’ve been you’re you live the rest of your life in a comfortable existence, not talking about any of these issues.

Sean Rasmussen [00:59:43]:
Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [00:59:44]:
But that’s not gonna happen with me. There will be no plea bargain at all. It will we’re gonna go the distance on this one. And I’ve got all the documents. I I’ve got, like, a treasure trove of documents, which we which which future generations can look at and say, you know, this is where we went wrong with this thing. Yeah. But this is the reason why I’m talking about this is because I was trying to tell the truth, my view of what the truth is, obviously, which could be wrong. But I was trying to explain why all these problems exist in in Aboriginal communities. And that was because we we what’s important in universities now is that you have the right proportion of Aboriginal academics in place. Yeah. So they were trying to get more Aboriginal academics at Mount Royal. These Aboriginal academics were saying, we don’t feel safe here because Francis Widdowson is making all these arguments about uneven and combined development. So they said, okay. Well, Francis Widdowson’s gotta go. Like

Sean Rasmussen [01:00:53]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [01:00:54]:
I was like, hey. Academic freedom, like, that’s protected, you know? And what about, you know, our free speech policy? That’s that’s the it’s like, no. That’s not your your tone, your satire, the way you’re talking about these things. That’s not the right tone. That’s harassment. That’s, creating a toxic work environment and so on, and so you’re out. Like like, that’s that’s what’s been done.

Sean Rasmussen [01:01:21]:
Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [01:01:22]:
Of course, this was fully supported by the union, what happened, which hopefully will not happen anymore. Anyway, so so now we’re back battling it out again. And,

Sean Rasmussen [01:01:34]:
but that’s

Frances Widdowson [01:01:34]:
that’s kind of the that’s that’s the start. So the start is, can we speak truthfully about Aboriginal policy and Aboriginal non Aboriginal relations? Is it possible to speak truthfully about this, or do we have to be concerned about Terry Tighe, Roseanne Casimir, Ted Godfriedson, etcetera, becoming upset. Yeah. Because they’re gonna be upset because the truth is not going to result in more money being diverted to the Aboriginal industry. That’s that’s the reality. But the the money going to the Aboriginal and the Aboriginal industry has to be defunded. So that’s the that’s the next step, I think. If we if we’re gonna agree that uneven and combined development is a real thing and that the Aboriginal industry just harms everything, it doesn’t do any good, it it actually makes things worse for Aboriginal people, then the money that’s going to the Aboriginal industry should not be going to the Aboriginal industry anymore. And the government should be providing the services that Aboriginal people need, which is that’s a big question as to how to do that because that hasn’t been done very well in the past. You know? Like, the residential schools had a lot of problems with them. I’m not I’m not trying to say that the residential schools were incredibly wonderful institutions that had no problems. They had a lot of problems, and that was due to a lot of people like Duncan Campbell Scott. Right? He’s was the superintendent, the head guy in in Indian affairs. He was a bit of a disciplinarian type. Like and he didn’t have a lot of empathy for the suffering that Aboriginal people were experiencing. And and so I do understand that Aboriginal people are suffering terribly, but lying to them is not going to address the that situation. And and they’re being lied to. And that’s why there’s so many Aboriginal people so angry because they can sort of sense that they’re being manipulated by all these things. But I’m not lying to Aboriginal people. I’m I’m I’m I’m saying this is a big problem, and and that has to be addressed. And how it should be addressed is is an open question. But, you know, saying that all these things, like, well, the Kamloops case, coming back to the Kamloops case, saying that the bodies of 202 children are buried in an apple orchard and that there’s mass murder that happened at the residential schools or that that saying that that’s true is is not is not gonna help us to address anything.

Sean Rasmussen [01:04:23]:
Given the popularity of looking at things from this sympathetic progressive viewpoint, like, which is dominant right now in

Frances Widdowson [01:04:32]:
Mhmm.

Sean Rasmussen [01:04:32]:
In Canada, in in the institutions, but also just the general lay population, I’ve I, you know, I brought this issue up a couple of times in a parties and various things just about the the Kamloops thing. And oftentimes, if you bring it up, people just kind of, like, stare at their shoes and try to get out of the conversation and kinda walk away. It’s it’s a very taboo thing to talk about because people just feel like you can’t actually talk about it.

Frances Widdowson [01:05:01]:
Well, it’s social disapproval. So and this is a big problem. So you have, like, the more coercive side of things, which is making things illegal and so on. But then we have, like, the the very soft side, which is, you know, you wanna get along with your your your friends and your neighbors and so on. You wanna live a life where you’re not, you know, mired in conflict, and you’re gonna lose friends. And and Mia Hughes was talking about this with respect to the trans issues. She was in Ottawa, and she had all these friends, and she started to realize that the trans thing didn’t make any sense. And so she would be talking to her friends about this, or on Facebook, or whatever, and all of a sudden people didn’t wanna talk to her anymore.

Sean Rasmussen [01:05:47]:
Mhmm.

Frances Widdowson [01:05:47]:
Most people, when they’re they’re faced with that, they’ll stop talking about what’s making people angry. And I like, I’ve went I you know, I’ve seen this so many times in my own case, and fortunately, I’m I’m married to Albert Howard who’s even more, like, I’m I’m more sensitive to my social relations than he is. Like, he will go he will walk the world alone saying what he thinks is true. And I’m I’m, like, I’ll walk quite a bit alone, but I, you know, in the end, I’ve I don’t wanna be thrown off the island, you know? I wanna be I wanna I wanna be able to get along with people. I want people to, you know, not think I’m a monster, and and and that’s what that’s really what’s going on. And and the devaluing of of the truth has has really made this incredibly difficult because since we don’t value that anymore in a as a society, the people who are truth tellers, they’re ostracized. And so when and the people who might who have a inclination to that are shut down. Like, they they they don’t go that on that path.

Sean Rasmussen [01:06:50]:
You self censor. Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [01:06:52]:
You self censor all the time, and and that’s kind of the more dangerous. And that’s why I think that the street epistemology method is so good is because it gets to the heart of self censorship. It attacks the self censorship. Yeah. Because that’s the biggest problem is people self censoring, people not being able to state the claim. And then so you never get to the actual what’s going on. So the claim is, you know, the remains of 215 children have been found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School. That’s the claim. But but and if you can do that in street epistemology, then you can we can have you can have the kind of conversation that that we’re having a bit, and that will then get other people to look at that and go, oh, okay. So there are you know, people are saying it, and they’re not the sky is hasn’t fallen. And and and that’s we can maybe put society back on a a more normal path. You know? Yeah. I don’t know. It’s it’s it’s it’s it’ll be interesting to see in the next few years where we’re going. You know? Are we going down a, you know, a authoritarian path and people will be disappeared if they’re doing this or whatever? Like, it’s possible, And and we can do something about it. We we can. We we’re still in a spot where we can use the like, there we don’t have the the apparatus has not become totalitarian at this stage.

Sean Rasmussen [01:08:20]:
You know, the the national response to the announcement of the the claim for the Kamloops burial, we we went from basically, you know, a claim that was being made that wasn’t actually investigated properly to this complete national uproar. And I was making some notes about what was happening at the time. Like, it became an international scandal. The New York Times that you mentioned before talked them as about its mass graves, which was factually not even, like, a lined up with the original claim in the first place. Then there was, like, the national shame. Trudeau got up and made a statement to the effect that Canada is a racist and genocidal country. And there was a, like, a public struggle session in schools and the media. There’s the orange t shirt thing, every child matters campaign, flags at half mast. Like, it was a huge production. Was that just like a moral panic because we were all coming out of George Floyd and and COVID? And what was going on there? Do you have any sense of how that evolved?

Frances Widdowson [01:09:25]:
So there’s the general thing, which is the hysteria. We and this happens. This the satanic panic was a it wasn’t on the same scale, but it it caused it it ruined ruined many lives. You know, people accused of satanic abuse and so on when there was no it was just a bunch of people who were disturbed, psychologically disturbed of being suggested to them. But but that’s so people being having things suggested to them, if they’re disturbed, they will absorb that and start believing it’s true. That that’s a phenomenon. So that’s the very general thing. But the more interesting question is, what leads people to to want to believe this?

Sean Rasmussen [01:10:09]:
Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [01:10:09]:
And especially people like journalists, which we haven’t talked very much about. I’ve talked about the academic side of things, and I saw that. I experienced it myself. My case is a very good example of of of why the academic side is so terribly corroded. But the journalistic side, which is another part of the story

Sean Rasmussen [01:10:33]:
Yeah. Which is kind of my interest because I mean, I like media, and I’m very concerned about the way the media has gone.

Frances Widdowson [01:10:39]:
So yeah. And and and this is is a wider problem. Journalists don’t value objectivity anymore.

Sean Rasmussen [01:10:47]:
Mhmm.

Frances Widdowson [01:10:48]:
They see their role as helping the oppressed. You know, that’s their that’s what they see. So things like trans activism, trans people are the most oppressed of, you know, all the sexual identity kind of things. They should be supported, And so, therefore, you’re not gonna have Mia Hughes or Megan Murphy or anyone like that on a CBC program about trans issues. With the unmarked grave stuff, I was interviewed last time by the CBC about this in 02/2023. Olivia Stefanovich interviewed me. I did a recording of that interview, the full interview, which I posted on my SoundCloud, which I thought was a fantastic interview. And she did a pretty good piece on it too. She interviewed Shawn Carlton who’s now the main spokesperson who argues about residential school denialism and supports the criminalization of of residential school denialism. And he’s he’s an unbelievable bad actor who will not discuss anything. It’s this complete, anti intellectual kind of mindset that he but he’s the the celebrated residential school denialism expert. And since to that that one interview that I did, which I thought, you know, anyone listening to that interview wouldn’t say, I’m a marginal figure and I’m a crazy I don’t know what, like, makes you so beyond the pale you cannot be interviewed in a a piece. But not just me, like, there’s 20, you know, 25 other people who are working in this group that I’m with who would also be excellent people to interview about this. Any one of the contributors to Grave Error, they won’t even they’ll just meant and they rarely mention the book itself.

Sean Rasmussen [01:12:45]:
Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [01:12:45]:
So they are they have decided we we should not never have our views directly represented. We should not have quotes that we put forward.

Sean Rasmussen [01:12:57]:
Sort of dangerous. Right? Like, it’s a danger to have ideas like yours publicized or something.

Frances Widdowson [01:13:03]:
Yeah. So it’s like, if we interview Frances Whittleson and have quotes from her in our article, we are contributing to the cultural genocide of Aboriginal people, and that that’s that’s hate speech, and that’s beyond the pale, and so on. Like like, that’s kind of what That’s

Sean Rasmussen [01:13:27]:
the thinking. Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [01:13:28]:
And it’s not what are the facts. Like, so that’s really how journalists should be operating is let’s get the facts on the ground, and then we’ll build our story from the facts. Mhmm. They start with a preconceived idea about what they would like things to be, and then shape things in accordance with that predetermined way of viewing things. So all these journalists that work for I don’t know what the right word is, but it’s like the established media organizations, You know, the Globe and Mail. Now the National Post is a bit of an exception to that.

Sean Rasmussen [01:14:06]:
Yeah. They’ve been starting to publish some of this stuff. Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [01:14:08]:
You know, and but unfortunately, because I’m a socialist and and I, like, I used to be more sensitive to this than I am now because now it’s like, look, we’ve got a bigger fight at at hand here. We’ve got a thing about being able to discuss things and have the truth be told. So, you know, anyone who wants to talk to me, you know, I I think I should talk to them and, you know, just to to get my views so that my views are out there. But, of course, if you you get interviewed by someone who’s who’s seemed to be not a reputable person, then, okay. Well, now, of course, she’s aligned with them, and it’s it’s just impossible.

Sean Rasmussen [01:14:48]:
Guilt by association. Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [01:14:49]:
Yeah. To navigate these things. But in terms of getting back to the journalists, which I think is this is a very important question. So why is the New York Times not taking that article down, and a retraction, which says there’s a mass grave was found. Yeah. So even if those two people whom they claim exist that no one knows the names of who said who said that they dug graves in the Kamloops Apple Orchard, Even if that’s true that they did dig graves in the apple orchard, that doesn’t mean that there’s a mass grave in the Kamloops Apple Orchard. So that story has got false information that’s in the story. So The New York Times, but it won’t.

Sean Rasmussen [01:15:36]:
Yeah, because of the ideology that’s kind of ensconced at The New York Times.

Frances Widdowson [01:15:40]:
Yeah. That means that The New York Times doesn’t value factual information anymore. They they think there’s something import more important than fact maybe it’s their reputation. So if they did a retraction for that and withdrew that article, then they would have to admit that they made there was a serious failure. And that and and then that might bring up a whole bunch of other misdeeds, and so it’s better just to ignore that and not have to face up to that reality. But at the same time, the the the other disturbing thing is that there’s not like a massive outcry about that.

Sean Rasmussen [01:16:24]:
Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [01:16:24]:
So if they don’t do a retraction and it’s still there, yet there’s no consequences to that, no one’s really doing anything about that, then it’s just it shows you a wider failure of the system. Journalistically, if you started talking about the the, deception, seems appear what appears to be a deception at Kamloops, then your job would I don’t know what happens to you. Like, what and and the signals, like, that’s the thing is is it’s often you’re given signals as to how to think about something. The the people who are mentoring you and the people who are making decisions, like, what are they saying to you? Yeah. It’s not really a

Sean Rasmussen [01:17:10]:
app One doesn’t do that. One doesn’t do that around here.

Frances Widdowson [01:17:14]:
Yeah. And it might not even be spoken, but there’s not a there’s not an atmosphere of we’re gonna get to the truth here. Like, we’re

Sean Rasmussen [01:17:22]:
No.

Frances Widdowson [01:17:23]:
And I don’t know what’s the kinds of conversations and what’s happening in media organizations Yeah. To prevent this from, you know, from from journalists from being able to, you know, pursue the facts and and tell the truth in various stories.

Sean Rasmussen [01:17:38]:
I I know that journalists are having a bit of a crisis that way. Mhmm. Trust trust in media has gotten to all time lows, and people are going to other things like podcasts and Substacks and different kinds of of ways of getting information. And so they’re having to contend with the fact that people don’t trust them anymore. And I think they’re having those conversations, but I don’t know if it’s happening fast enough or or hard enough yet. But Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [01:18:05]:
I was just listening to something, but do you know who Carol Off is?

Sean Rasmussen [01:18:09]:
CBC host. Right, was she?

Frances Widdowson [01:18:10]:
Yeah. Yeah. So this is a good example of someone. So Carol Off is an embarrassment. I’m just gonna be blunt. I know her mostly from the gender ideology file when she was interrogating a librarian from somewhere in Ontario for allowing Megan Murphy to come and speak at the library about some Megan Murphy’s views. And it was just this absolutely horrible interview where Carol Off was kind of comparing Meghan Murphy to a Nazi and stuff, or making these comparisons. Yeah. She didn’t say Meghan Murphy’s a Nazi, but she was saying, you know, what about having Hitler coming to speak at the library? And, and I know wokeism is a difficult term because it’s often just used as a pejorative to insult, so long. Yeah. But there’s a number of books written on wokeism, and so she’s going, Pierre Polio, he wants to get wokeism out of the the schools. Wokeism, what is that? What is that? She’s doing it’s like, read a book.

Sean Rasmussen [01:19:26]:
Do your job.

Frances Widdowson [01:19:27]:
Do your job. It’s not this made up thing. It is a real phenomenon. And get out a mirror and look at your you’re woke. You think that anything where he says that biological sex is real, and that there’s just male and female, you you won’t even interview anyone who thinks that because you’re woke and you think that trans identities are things that, you know, must be affirmed and celebrated and so on. So, you know, so Carol Off, I think, is a is a good example of what’s wrong with journalism and the fact that Carol Off is celebrated by a whole bunch of next generation journalists.

Sean Rasmussen [01:20:09]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [01:20:09]:
That’s kind of like, you know, I wanna be like Carol Ogg.

Sean Rasmussen [01:20:12]:
There’s a culture problem there.

Frances Widdowson [01:20:14]:
And also it’s like, you know, instead of celebrating, you know, a George Orwell kind of figure who who really didn’t really align himself with any kind of tribe. Like, he was he was about liberty and, you know, as a socialist, but he thought that prop he understood propaganda, and he was he was very much into getting the facts, the inconvenient facts, exposing inconvenient facts. Whatever they may be, you wanna expose the the ridiculous things that Pierre Poliyev says just as much you wanna expose the ridiculous things that Jagmeet Singh or, you know, Mark Carney say. You know? Like, that that’s a journalist shouldn’t be trying to curry favor with any particular powerful person.

Sean Rasmussen [01:21:02]:
I know it’s, I’m really, yeah, upset about the state of journalism right now. But if people wanna follow your work and find out about more about your upcoming documentary, where can they go?

Frances Widdowson [01:21:13]:
Yeah. So the website is www.wokeacademy.info. Okay. So that website, I try to post everything on that website. And Facebook is the other area which I post everything on fee actually, the most is on Facebook because it’s just easier to do it. I probably propose something every day, but the more kind of curated stuff is on, the wokeacademy.info site.

Sean Rasmussen [01:21:44]:
Okay. Okay. And your documentary, what’s the, what’s the title gonna be?

Frances Widdowson [01:21:50]:
The title is, uncovering the grave error at Kamloops. Okay. And we have a trailer that we just I’m working with Simon Herrigot, who is a freelance journalist from Kamloops who was fired from Global News or fired from a media I think it was Global because he was challenging, I think it was the coverage of the truckers was his was challenging. But he was, at the time, was in Kamloops and was covering the Kamloops case and did not get support for wanting to do more investigative journalism. Anyway, he’s fantastic videographer, and we’re trying to raise $50,000 for this documentary. There’s a fundraiser on that that is, the wokeacademy.info site has information about that and also Facebook because we need, like he’s a he needs to be paid.

Sean Rasmussen [01:22:43]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Frances Widdowson [01:22:44]:
And we need we’re gonna try to travel to Victoria to, Kamloops, of course. Like, that’s the main one. It’s Kamloops, Abbotsford, which is where Sarah Bollier works, and the Simon Fraser University archaeology department, which is under a gag order by the Kamloops band and can’t discuss the case. So more if we can get the $50,000, we can go to all those locations. If we if we get less, then we’ll probably just have to just go to Kamloops. But that’s they can support they can be a part of supporting that documentary, which I think is gonna be an excellent is gonna be an excellent expose of sort of the more detailed factors that were involved what is appears to be a deception.

Sean Rasmussen [01:23:28]:
So we touched on that a little bit, but you get more of it if you get to the documentary.

Frances Widdowson [01:23:33]:
Yeah. Yeah. So what we talked about was mostly what happened around May and June, but the timeline is incredibly important because it shows you each step what occurred, and what we wanna do is we wanna delve more deeply into and especially with respect to the universities. There’s three universities that are implicated. Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, University Of Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, and the Simon Fraser University in Burnaby. Okay. Those three universities really allowed this deception to really take off and gave, gave academic legitimacy to the kind of very dodgy kinds of accounts that were being done Fascinating. Straightforward, yeah.

Sean Rasmussen [01:24:31]:
That sounds great. And do you guys have a timeline?

Frances Widdowson [01:24:33]:
Planning on shooting, you know, April, May kinda period. And then the summer is gonna be the editing is gonna be the huge that’s most of the expenses in the editing. Because just during the trailer, Simon worked, I think he worked about a week on the trail, like editing the trailer. So that was, like, two and a half minutes. It’s like, this is gonna be you know, I’m not sure how long. It might be an hour. Probably, we’re gonna need an hour to to do justice to it. So that’s gonna be a massive editing job that we’re gonna have to do with the sauna.

Sean Rasmussen [01:25:06]:
Sounds great. Well, good luck with the the project.

Frances Widdowson [01:25:09]:
Yes. And I have a YouTube I should mention I have a YouTube channel. So I’ve done a number of videos already which are very low budget, which is zero. Yes.

Sean Rasmussen [01:25:21]:
And so it’s like it’s like a podcast. Right? Like a video podcast, basically. Like, you do regular episodes? Or

Frances Widdowson [01:25:26]:
Yeah. So I have a podcast called the rational space disputations, which I’ve done, I think, about 38. I think it’s 38 episodes. But I do videos, like, which are more sophisticated, like the Mount Royal University murders academic freedom, which which has a bunch of visuals and everything in it, and it’s about that meeting. And then the other one that Daniel Page helped me with was, the University of Regina Rumble. So I went to the University of Regina with Daniel Page and Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson, who’s a psychology professor adjunct psychology professor, and we did a street epistemology session at the University of China. And that was just amazing. Like, that because I this guy, his name is Russell Fayan. He’s a professor there. He showed up with his class, and they were trying to hold me to account for my views. And we had some good interactions with the students there. And then we went to the library to to do the talks. So it got canceled at the University of Regina. So we booked the library to do the talks, one of the talks there. And University of Regina administrator, she showed up with two thugs, and they disrupted the talk to the point that one of them physically threatened a member of the audience, an 86 year old man, and that’s all we got that as well. Like, that was just that was crazy, and that’s part of the the University of Regina rumble.

Sean Rasmussen [01:27:04]:
Okay. Interesting. Wow.

Frances Widdowson [01:27:05]:
So that’s on the YouTube channel. I believe it’s Francis Widowson sixteen hundred. That’s the, that’s the handle for the YouTube channel. But there’s a lot of material on the YouTube channel.

Sean Rasmussen [01:27:15]:
Well, thanks again for participating in the Viewpoints podcast. It’s been illuminating, and and, I really like what you’re doing with sticking by your guns and just going for truth, which is

Frances Widdowson [01:27:27]:
Yes.

Sean Rasmussen [01:27:28]:
Pretty rare these days. So

Frances Widdowson [01:27:30]:
Yes. Well, I will not give in a one thousandth of an inch, as I said before, because that’s what happens is people just cave, and why would you not just carry through to the end? Just keep constant pressure, pursue what you think is right. If you make a mistake, say, well, you know, I made a mistake there. But don’t give in because you think, you know, somehow this is gonna make things easier because it won’t. Yeah. It’ll make things worse. It actually makes things worse. So, you know, fight it out. Fight it out to the end.

Sean Rasmussen [01:28:11]:
That’s it for this episode of viewpoints. Thanks for listening. If you like viewpoint diversity and you wanna hear more like this, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. To find out more, visit viewpointspodcast.ca. And if you have ideas for topics or guests, we’d love to hear from you. You can connect using the contact form in the website, or you can send me an email directly at sean@viewpointspodcast.ca.