Sheila Gunn Reid examines Kamloops, the Buried Truth, where Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation’s May 27, 2021, claim of 215 unmarked graves via ground-penetrating radar (GPR) lacked excavation or forensic testing—no bodies were found. Dr. Sarah Bollier, their GPR specialist, faced RCMP intimidation and legal advice from Murray Sinclair, while $320M in government funding bypassed proper investigations. Anomalies may stem from drainage ditches or Christian burial practices, yet media framed it as genocide-linked graves, sparking 67 church burnings. Justin Trudeau’s "understanding" of attackers’ motives and Harsha Wallia’s tribunal case highlight the narrative’s divisive impact, underscoring how unchallenged claims can distort justice and reconciliation. [Automatically generated summary]
Will we ever get to the bottom of what was hidden just beneath the surface of the ground at the Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia?
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Truth matters.
And I don't mean the subjective truth nonsense of this day, you know, his truth, your truth, her truth, my truth.
What I mean are the immutable facts.
Those things matter.
You need facts to be able to formulate an informed opinion, to take a position, to formulate a solution to a problem.
You need truth before you can get to reconciliation.
That's why I'm so proud of the work that my friend Drea Humphrey has done to do her best to slice through the impossible rhetoric to find out what's really going on at the Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia.
What was initially reported as a shocking discovery of mass graves of murdered children at the site of a residential school has quietly morphed into something very, very different.
So the first piece of evidence I want to discuss is the alleged juvenile tooth that was found near the site of the mass graves.
It has been categorically refuted and it is not a human tooth.
That is conclusive.
So that piece of shocking evidence that broke so many hearts, well, turns out to be nothing.
There is also the fact of the reported juvenile rib bone.
The juvenile rib bone that surfaced in the same area.
And a rib bone that has not been tested.
And in fact, presently, to the best of our understanding, nobody knows where it is.
So the two sort of material pieces of evidence that most closely and most accurately suggest there may be bodies there are either missing or have been categorically debunked.
Now here's the thing.
No excavations have been done at the site and that evidence, the rib bone and the juvenile tooth, it's either debunked or missing.
Seems odd, right?
69 churches across the country were targets of hate crimes in the wake of this so-called discovery at the Kamloops residential school and the irresponsible reporting that followed.
They were either burned or vandalized.
Hate crimes against Catholics skyrocketed.
And yet still, no investigation of the alleged crimes that took place at the residential school.
If a crime went on there, we must bring the perpetrators to justice.
But if there was a lie, we must hold that liar accountable.
But no one in the establishment seems all that interested in proving their own theories about the residential school.
That's why our friend Drea Humphrey and her producer, Matt Brevner, have a brand new documentary.
It's called Kamloops, the Buried Truth, and it is available exclusively to our paywalled subscribers who subscribe at RebelNewsPlus.com.
You can find the documentary at kamloopsdocumentary.com.
So joining me now in an interview we recorded yesterday evening is my friend Drea Humphrey to discuss her documentary, why I think she's perfectly suited to do it and her motivation to make it.
Take a listen.
So joining me now is my friend and colleague, Dre Humphrey, to talk about her new project to shine some light on the buried truth of what happened in Kamloops.
Look at that.
Look at me hinting towards what everything's called.
Drea, thanks for being on the show.
I know that you're filming this in the evening.
you're out of your house you're you're out and about but i i thank you so much for taking the time to do this um first of all what before we get into everything what's the documentary called and how can people find it and support it because your documentary is completely independent um you have no big deep pocket donors telling you what to do or say so let's start off there and then we'll get into the nuts and bolts of the documentary Yeah, so like you said, it's called Kamloops the Buried Truth.
And it's basically about the discovery that we all heard about May 27th of last year that took place at the Takumloop Shishwamik First Nation, where at the time the press release said there had been confirmed the discovery of 215 former residential school students there.
Later on, it came out that they were talking about at the apple orchard by the school there.
And so I think I perhaps was one of the only reporters at the time to do a report asking certain things like, how did you come up with 215 kids with brown penetrating radar?
So those were one of the red flags sort of early on that I couldn't get the answers to.
So a year later, myself and BC producer Matt Brevner head back to Kamloops to try to get some clarity.
You would think a year later that's what would be available, but we were kind of shocked with what we found.
And I don't think it's too much a spoiler.
I think it's still worth watching, but some of you may already know that not a single body has in fact been discovered at that supposed unmarked grave site in Kamloops.
Now, I want to ask you, what made you a skeptic right off the hop?
And I'm not even sure if you were a skeptic.
You were just like, the dots are not connecting here in that first little bit when it was like, we found over 200 grave, they said graves here, and it was reported as like mass graves as mass graves at the very beginning.
And then it just kicked off discovery after discovery after discovery after discovery, heavy on the quotation marks, which then set off church burnings and anti-Christian hate crimes, vandalism.
I would say it's terrorism.
It was a summer of hate crimes that Justin that Justin Trudeau said, well, I can understand why you're doing this.
Like, hey, don't do it, but I get why you're doing it.
What, what sort of was the first sort of thing that you thought, you know, something's not quite right here?
Well, I certainly wasn't a skeptic going in.
I mean, we've all heard about some of the horrible things that took place at residential schools.
And I know that, you know, even with soldiers and things like that, there are unmarked graves.
So there was that aspect of it.
So Matt and I came in to Kamloops with that first report, just wanting to make sure that we did the people justice, that we conveyed, you know, the heartbreak that was happening from the stories.
What we didn't expect to find, and I think this is when, you know, the journalistic light bulb started going off, was why I couldn't get any answers from the RCMP or the BC coroner's office about what is happening with this investigation.
I mean, the whole country for sure, lots around the world is looking at it like this was this huge mass murder of children.
So surely the RCMP and the BC coroner's coroner's office had been investigating.
And that's not what I found in that first report.
And I say in that report that, you know, it just seems very interesting that the people who are closest to the situation or should be closest to the situation are either unwilling or unable to, you know, give any answers to that.
So that was a major red flag to me.
And then there was also sort of the talk about how when the RCMP did in fact try to ask some questions, they had been told sort of you're intimidating the specialist at the time.
The specialist name wasn't named.
We now know it's Dr. Sarah Bollier.
And so all of that just seemed awfully weird for like what you're saying, everything that followed there.
And we don't even know who's properly investigating this.
It was all just the ban.
So I never stopped trying to get more answers for a full year.
And then that brought us to this documentary going down and getting some more clarification for the public.
And I want to be clear: you came at this, like you said, you just came at this completely with an open mind.
And I think your background makes you, I think, the perfect person to investigate this because you are Indigenous and you are Christian.
So you have a foot in both worlds here.
And so I think your only motivation was truth.
Absolutely.
That's what we came there to do.
And I'm happy to say that we did do that.
And I had some family members that went to residential schools.
They went to day school, slightly different back east.
And so, you know, there's the people over the shoulder.
You also have to remember your own family and make sure you're representing them, you know, in a good way, which doesn't make this documentary easy, I might add.
Sure.
Because no matter what, there's a lot of people who get offended by the truth, by facts.
And so I'm sort of anticipating that to somewhat.
But it was, you know, so many people were so hurt and so upset.
I mean, we interviewed one residential school survivor who went to that school.
He said him and his wife went to that school for years, both of them over 10 years, and they had no clue until they heard the press release that there was, you know, supposedly children buried there.
So, you know, he's an elderly man going through all this heartbreak right now.
And so it was, it was, you know, it was very important for us to let people speak.
It was a longer report, of course, and to speak with people who went there and how the community was, but also to ask those questions like, you know, these things are not making sense.
And the public should at least know that we were unable to get simple answers to, you know, this situation.
You know, I think this is interesting too because this did this takes place in British Columbia.
And what I do know about British Columbia and my other sort of fascination with serial killers is that completely.
Serial killers, cults.
I'm just fascinated by what happens to people when they choose darkness.
What I do know is BC has dealt with finding and identifying forensic, like identifying bodies in a very meticulous forensic way over a big chunk of land, a bigger chunk of land than I think this apple orchard on the at the site of the residential school was.
And I'm referring to the Picton farm, where a serial killer worked the downtown Eastside for a very long time.
Women were cut up, fed to pigs, and their remains were spread around.
And the police were able to dig through the dirt and find bones and other identifying pieces of, I hate to describe it, as human biological material, but they found it.
They were able to identify those remains so that they could give closure to the families.
I found it odd that when the media is saying this is a mass grave, this is a mass casualty event, this is a site of a genocide.
Yeah.
And a shovel never hit the ground.
I said, these are this is a criminal investigation.
Where's the cops?
That's that's immediately that's what I found odd because I thought BC has expertise in this.
Yeah, exactly.
It was super odd.
And I don't want to give away this part of the documentary, but you will see a conversation that happens with one of the lead investigators in the BC coroner's office who talks about whether or not the way that they discovered this is possible.
And you're right, there are certain ways to do this and to do it right.
And if a shovel doesn't hit the ground, what exactly did we discover?
We have no clue.
And, you know, our colleague Adam Soast did a great report on that too.
If people haven't seen that, so you know, I wish, I wish this wasn't the case.
I wish, well, that's not true.
I mean, obviously, we don't want children buried under the ground, but you know, I wish I didn't have to be doing a report or a documentary on something so important to so many people across Canada.
You know, I say that it is linked to a national identity of shame.
You know, like what our children are talking about, it's just kind of, I think you have a report coming up if it's not out already.
You know, hate crimes against Catholics has gone up 260% or something like that in Canada.
I mean, this is insane.
And if this is all from something that isn't even truthful to begin with, we need to know that.
You know, I think that's what's so important in all of this.
And I think that's why when we have a catastrophic event that happens in this country, we try to have inquiries because before you can have reconciliation, you have to have the truth part first.
And it doesn't seem like we're really interested in pursuing the truth part here.
And again, it seems so easy, just put a shovel in the ground.
But that just hasn't happened yet.
And, you know, our flags flew at half mast.
You know, churches were burning.
And we haven't gotten to the truth.
Yeah.
In BC.
Yeah.
And we still haven't gotten the truth, but we're getting closer to that.
And, you know, it is what it is.
Facts, unfortunately, they don't care about anybody's feelings.
So we're going to see what happens here.
And another invite, if anybody from the band, you know, Chief Roseanne Casmir, if you want to have an interview and help clear the air on everything, please get a hold of us.
We do speak with the chief as well in the documentary.
Now, has anybody ever told you why they haven't started any sort of forensic examination here?
Don't you like?
This is the part that I can't understand.
I would think that the families deserve answers.
It seems to be as though it's not clearly explained, but it's sort of tied into sort of, you know, the way to be respectful in the situation, right?
Why No Investigation?00:07:51
However, repatriation is very important in Indigenous communities, and that's making sure your ancestors remains are where they belong.
And that's something that you would think would be very important when we talk about residential students who were taken from across Canada to go to a school.
You would think that that would be sort of the primary focus of this whole situation and yet another reason to put the shovel into the ground.
And you talk about needing truth before reconciliation.
Absolutely.
That's why it's truth and reconciliation.
You know, the government is working on the reconciliation part.
I think they promised $320 million towards these grave sites.
So we need to make sure, especially when that amount of money is coming out, that there are facts aligned with the claim as well.
I mean, that's just simple common sense.
Yeah.
And I'm concerned that the money is doled out, but it's not attached to the grave site.
It's, oh, you, you have, oh, you found a grave site.
Here's a bunch of money.
And it's not for investigation.
It's not for the truth part of reconciliation.
Were you able to, or at least attempt to, speak to the investigator, investigator who did the ground penetrating radar?
Were you able to try to query her?
Absolutely.
I tried more than once, many times.
I believe Adam Sos has tried as well.
And neither of us have heard a single peep.
And this is the same specialist who, when the RCMP was trying to ask her questions as well, Murray Sinclair, who was formerly, I forget his role with the truth and reconciliation, but he claimed that she felt intimidated and he advised her to get a lawyer to deal any further with the RCMP.
So I don't think she's very fond of answering any kind of questions from people who want to really understand or investigate what's going on.
This is the part, well, there's so much of this that I just can't understand.
Imagine in any other situation saying, I found dead bodies.
They're right here.
And the cops, and I think a crime is associated with it.
And the cops are like, okay, great.
We want to talk to you.
And she says, no.
How does she get away with this?
I don't know.
You know, they keep saying, oh, we're leaving the investigation up to the band.
Well, the band government is politicians.
That's like saying we're leaving the investigation up to Trudeau.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like, it's, it's, what's going on here?
Yeah, I think that's that's the craziest part.
If there are indeed dead children, murdered children here, I want a police investigation.
I want people held to account.
I want these children treated in the same way as any other missing or murdered child anywhere in the country.
I just don't know why the people who found the graves found the graves don't feel the same way.
Well, I imagine there are some who do.
I know there are her chief Roseanne, she's a former chief now, but she had spoken out and say, said, you know, we need to get into the ground.
We need to find out what happened, how many kids.
Maybe there's more.
Maybe there's 500 kids.
You know, we need to know what happened.
But it doesn't seem to be, it doesn't seem to matter what other people think because everything is being led up to or left up to the band.
Now, Adam Sos, as you alluded to, did a great report.
And he, in communication with another investigator who's been looking into this, that investigator, Nina Green, Nina Green, I believe it is, she pulled the she pulled the archival records of the site and said, oh, there's drainage ditches here, like drainage ditches going this way in the exact direction as these,
the graves.
So the ground disturbance is identical to what they have decided is graves.
Okay, great.
Can we dig up the ground and can we find A, a ditch or B, a child that needs a proper burial with their people?
Absolutely.
You know, that was such a huge story.
If you guys haven't seen yet, make sure you watch it yet.
And when Matt and I went out to do the documentary, that was around the one-year anniversary time.
So it was around June that we went.
So Adam and this researcher worked together for this, what you just described there.
And It was good for me to hear, you know, well, what could the other option be?
Because I'm not, I'm not saying that this investigator is just pulling something out of thin air.
She described it as after when she changed her story a bit, she described it as, you know, anomalies consistent with Christian burials.
And you're right.
Well, guess what else is consistent with the shape of Christian burials?
It's also potentially garbage blocks.
Yeah, East-West ditches.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I don't think we'll find out without digging.
And I don't think we'll find out if anybody does dig, like, unless it's all up to the band whether they want to tell us what they dig, if they dig, and what they found if they did dig.
And that's the part that also I can't get my head around.
The band is elected politicians.
They're not the police.
If a crime happened, these children are Canadians and they should be treated like every other Canadian.
And if their deaths were criminal, if their deaths even happened at the school, they're owed the truth.
Their families are owed the truth.
There's another thing.
Sorry, before I know that you probably have something to say there, but there were two things that were initially that this, the ground-penetrating radar investigator who said that these were graves, she said there was a juvenile rib bone and a tooth found on the site.
That's one of our nuggets in the documentary.
And Adam and this researcher pointed out too.
And there has been a couple of news outlets that have kind of said, hmm, what's going on here since then?
But I have not heard anybody talk about the rib bone.
We talk about it in the documentary as well.
And then the tooth.
But the only physical evidence for this huge discovery that has changed the fabric of our nation is in fact apparently the discovery of a child or a juvenile tooth, juvenile rib bone, and what was reported as a child's tooth, which according to Adam's report, I don't know, and maybe Nina's investigation was not actually a child's tooth.
But even the rib bone, you'll see in the documentary, we talk about the rib bone a lot.
And I think you'll see that, you know, this might not be a human's rib bone as well.
So again, there needs to be a proper investigation here.
That's that's the main thing to find out truth about what happened so that the proper people can be held accountable in the situation and so that those children can be laid properly to rest if they're under there and so that the rumors can be laid to rest if they are not.
And so the country can heal.
There's a lot of terrible things happened last year based on that spread from this discovery.
Church Burnings Stuck With Me00:03:32
A lot of people were blamed for a lot of the things.
There's a lot of, you know, call me people say I'm religious and superstitious, but I don't believe in generational curses.
There were a lot of people last year burning churches who sure did.
Yeah, it's justice, I think one lady said in my report.
So yeah, that's not what happened there was not okay.
It's not Canadian.
It didn't matter if the politicians wanted to stand or speak against it or not.
It's not okay.
It doesn't belong here.
And it's actual hate that came from it.
It's scary to see that something like that can happen close to 68 or maybe even 60.
No, one church, it was found that it wasn't actually hate motivated.
So I'll say 67 churches were burnt and vandalized in just over two months after this discovery.
I mean, let that sink in.
That is attacks against Christians, against Canadian communities, against places of worship.
And so we definitely need the truth to this story.
Canadians deserve that much.
You know what?
Before I let you go, because I know you have something to do and I appreciate you taking the time.
I don't think you're going to be any much longer at all.
That's the main thing.
So funny.
One of the things, one of the church burnings that really stuck with me that you covered last year was a Coptic church.
And that really stuck with me because the cops are some of the most persecuted Christians on the face of the earth.
It's not a holy week goes by when they are not butchered or killed in their churches.
And, you know, these are cops who came to Canada guaranteed religious freedom, the ability to practice their faith in peace and security in a way that they can in their homeland.
And they came here and their church was burned for something they didn't do.
Exactly.
And, you know, they were just mortified in that report.
We got to interview some of them.
But you're right.
They have, they are so persecuted elsewhere.
Their churches are bombed.
Their tongues have been cut off for saying their prayers.
And here they are in Canada thinking they're safe.
And then someone torches their church right packaged in while other churches were being torched and vandalized.
It was such a heartbreaking story.
And there were some local politicians that came out, like the mayor.
And I remember liberal Randeep Sarai came out, MP Randeep Sarai.
And I did follow that case.
It did turn out that it seemed to be more of a mental illness sort of element to that as well.
But, you know, the fact that these Christian communities were living in fear, is my church going to be next?
Am I going to be hurt when I'm walking?
I felt that.
Yeah, you know, and there was another family, I think it was back east, where the family lived in the church for some reason.
And the church was lit on fire while the dad was home.
And so this is, it's just, I can't believe Canada got to this point.
And I still don't even think Canadians have really owned what happened.
You know, there wasn't even much outrage to that.
It was so shocking.
So such a little card.
If we saw 60 church burnings in Russia, boy, Justin Trudeau would sure speak out against it.
And he sure wouldn't find a way to empathize or understand with the arsonists like he did here in Canada.
Protesting and Truth Seeking00:03:48
Well, I remember the human rights tribunal, what was her name?
Harsha Wallia, I believe.
She said, burn them all down.
You know, like.
Well, Drea, I want to thank you so much for your hard work on this important piece of journalism.
I know that you probably feel tugged in all directions.
And I'm sure you're going to get a little bit of blowback from some people who just don't want the truth to come out.
But as they say, the truth shall set you free.
Yeah, counting on that.
And thanks for everybody who's going to watch it.
Let me know.
I got an email.
Let me know what you think.
And also thanks to Matt Bredner, who did a great job helping putting all together so you guys can see it firsthand and up close.
The only way, the only platform to do so, Rebel News.
Yes.
Thanks to Matt, especially.
I mean, he just does great work.
He's not a videographer.
He's a cinematographer.
Thanks for having me, Tila.
Thanks, Drea.
I'm going to go fade into the night now.
Bye.
To get more information about when in-person screenings of Kamloops The Buried Truth are taking place, make sure you keep checking back at that special website, KamloopsDocumentary.com.
Now, this is the portion of the show where we normally take our viewer feedback.
You see, unlike the mainstream media, we here at Rebel News actually do want to hear from you.
We care about what you think about the work that we're doing.
That's why I invite you, I ask you, send me an email to sheila at rebelnews.com.
But do me a favor, put gun show letters in the subject line so I can easily find it.
I get a million emails a day.
Today's comment comes from someone called Soldier of Light, and I'm pretty sure that's not your real name, who says, why is the government of Canada continually investing in isolation camps?
And then they send me a link to a government press release that I've actually previously reported on.
So you can find that on rebelnews.com.
But I think we all know why the government is continuing to invest in isolation camps, which are really COVID jails.
And that's because the COVID scare and the Arrive Can spy app.
Well, those two things are absolutely never going away.
Those two tools are the things by which the government controls every aspect of your life.
One is an excuse for constant government spending, extra rules, and a crackdown on political dissidents protesting.
And the other one, that spy app, that's how they can identify those people who might be some of those pesky political dissidents.
You know, the isolation camps, the COVID jails, they're kind of just the backstory.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I should tell you why I'm standing here in the bushes.
But before I do that, I'll see everybody back in the studio next week.
But just so you know, I'm out reporting in Red Deer today.
I'm covering the trial of Chris Scott.
He's the dissident diner owner from Mirror, Alberta, who faces enormous fines.
And he was even incarcerated for protesting after his property was seized because he reopened his restaurant in defiance of the lockdowns.
Now, if you haven't seen our coverage, please go to our website, rebelnews.com, and you can see all of my live tweets from inside the courtroom there.