Sheila Gunn-Reid welcomes Michelle Sterling, a journalist and researcher, who challenges Canada’s residential school narrative—debunking claims of genocide by citing Grey Nuns Diaries documenting Indigenous infanticide and priest-led rescues, while noting 700K+ children attended voluntarily before 1960. Sterling questions Kamloops’ "215 unmarked graves" as likely septic trenches, not mass burials, and critiques Sugarcane’s false priest-abuse allegations, exposing Ed Archie Noisecat’s father as Indigenous man Ray Peters. She also rejects forced DNA testing to prove paternity, highlighting Williams Lake’s non-Indigenous demographics, and contrasts systemic abuse with orphanhood trauma. The episode ties these critiques to broader concerns over historical guilt narratives and media suppression of dissent, like transgender healthcare debates, urging audience engagement to counter perceived distortions. [Automatically generated summary]
What's the truth behind the recent spate of documentaries detailing the alleged abuses at Canada's residential schools?
I brought in an independent researcher to tell us what she found.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
With several critically acclaimed documentaries about Canada's residential school system and the alleged atrocities that took place therein, I wondered how much of this has been fact-checked.
Well, there are people fact-checking these documentaries in real time.
One of them is my friend Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science.
So today's interview is long.
I'm going to cut to the chase.
I'm going to stop my introduction here and just go directly into my interview with Michelle.
Take a listen.
Joining me now is my friend and good friend of The Rebel, Michelle Sterling.
Michelle is, I would describe you as an independent researcher specifically on this topic of residential schools.
Before we get into your article with the Western Standard that has this incredible title, Before the Priests and Nuns When Every Child Did Not Matter, why don't you tell us how this topic became an area where you have become not just an independent researcher, but an independent journalist, I would describe you as.
Tell us how this became a focus for you.
Well, years ago in the 1980s, I did a series of documentaries with CTV Calgary, and we were like a very small crew, but we traveled all over southern Alberta and to some extent in the north of Alberta up to around Edmonton as well and interviewed various pioneers.
I worked under the supervision of Dr. Hugh Dempsey, also known as Potena, who was chief with the honorary chief with the Blackfoot Nation.
Fathers and Daughters00:15:10
He was married to Pauline Dempsey, Pauline Johnson Dempsey, the daughter of Senator, sorry, Pauline Gladstone Dempsey, the daughter of Senator Gladstone.
And so, you know, I interviewed all these different pioneers and when the first stories of mass graves and genocide started coming out, and even going back to when Senator Lynn Bayak stood up in the Senate and said, hey, you know, a lot of people benefited from Indian residential schools, I wrote her a letter based on my research at the time saying that that's true.
Some did suffer, but many did benefit.
So, you know, the whole concept of a genocide just is ludicrous because I also did a documentary on the many genocides in the world, and it was so dark that we actually decided not to release it.
what went on at residential schools was not genocide.
And I even argue that it was not cultural genocide because many of the Oblate fathers actually made written forms for these indigenous oral languages which had no written form before.
They created dictionaries.
They, in Kamloops, one priest was publishing a regular weekly newspaper in what was known as Chinook Wawa, which was kind of a variation on shorthand, but it allowed people to read all this information from the local tribes in a very simple and easy way.
So, you know, I've rejected the genocide concept for a long time.
And I think, you know, when the first story of mass graves came out, I too felt terrible.
But it was my understanding that, you know, what probably had been discovered at the time might have been like a mass grave related to, say, a typhus epidemic or tuberculosis, passing of a family because entire families often passed away from it or cholera, Spanish flu.
But I didn't ever think that there was something nefarious going on.
And so I guess I just started talking from my heart, you know, and realizing there are, I think, about half a million Aboriginal people in Canada who are Catholics.
So, and their families were Catholics long before they ever went to residential school or continued in the Catholic faith.
And there's another, I think, about 200,000 who are Christians of other denominations.
So, you know, this is really a divisive issue within the Aboriginal community, as well as in the broader Canadian community.
And it's a total distortion of history.
So I just, you know, I feel the burden of all the people I interviewed back in the 80s.
I feel I have to carry their stories forward and create some balance in the narrative.
And so how do you respond to accusations of this new shut up?
The new shut up is if you question the official narrative by the bands, and I guess by extension, the Trudeau government, that the residential schools were a form of genocide, and that there are these mass graves at many of the former residential schools, that you are a residential school denialist.
How do you respond to that?
Well, I usually start pulling out historical documents and books.
Like, here's the volume one of the official history of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or the Northwest Mounted Police, as they were called at the time.
So these things were documented at the time.
And that's the historical record.
So I pull out these kinds of documents.
There's nobody in the 1800s, 18 or 1900s sitting there thinking, wow, you know, I bet in the future, somebody's going to want to, you know, accuse us of doing bad things.
So let's just hide them.
You know, that's not a thing.
So in fact, most people are unaware that in the United States, there were Indian wars going on there between the U.S. cavalry and Native people from 1644.
You know, and they went until 1924.
So while we were educating Indigenous people in Canada, giving them the skills of reading, writing, arithmetic, with which they are now using today to launch class action lawsuits against non-Indigenous people and the government of Canada and the Roman Catholic Church and other churches, while we were educating and caring for these children, the United States was hunting down and gunning down Indigenous people.
These were real wars and they were really vicious.
And in some cases, you know, certainly Native people in the U.S. were provoked because settlers kept coming in and just plunking themselves down on what looked like, you know, here's some good farmland.
I'm going to sit here.
There was no treaty.
So Native people would say, hey, wait a minute, you know, you're sitting on our land.
Boom, boom.
People would shoot each other.
Cavalry would come in, chaos.
That never happened in Canada.
You know, in Canada, we had trading partners with the Aboriginal people from the earliest times here.
I think the first Christian convert in Canada was back in the 1600s.
And Indigenous people adopted Christianity because they saw that somehow these people coming here had manifestly more useful things, tools.
Now, whether they understood it as some kind of magical spiritual advantage or whether they felt there was an alignment, a spiritual alignment with many of the aspects of Christianity, they adopted it and they became trading partners.
So we have, you know, over 400, 300 years of trading, economic trade partnerships with Aboriginal communities.
At any time, they could have overwhelmed and murdered the small groups of people who came here had they wanted to.
And, you know, certainly there were a couple of priests who were brutally murdered down in the Ontario region.
I can't remember, but that was very early on.
But subsequently, it was a trade arrangement.
That's what we've always had in Canada, and it's completely different than in the United States.
It's a completely different relationship.
Thank you.
I forgot what your question was.
No, it's okay.
I don't think I answered it.
No, I think you did.
I think you're referring to the Martyr Shrine in Midland, Ontario.
But I'm glad that you pointed out earlier in our conversation that there were specific efforts from Catholic priests to preserve the cultures of not just Indigenous people, but where I'm from, to preserve the culture of Ukrainian people.
So we have the Basilian Fathers Museum, where the fathers there recognized that the Russians or the Soviets were slowly smothering the Ukrainian culture.
And the place that would survive would be the place where so many Ukrainians settled.
And they started gathering up the cultural artifacts to make sure that when the evil empire of the Soviet Union fell, that there would be remains of a culture that was being smothered somewhere else.
And the Oblate fathers did a lot of that work too to preserve Indigenous culture.
Oh, I was just going to say they created the syllabics, they created a written form of Aboriginal languages.
Many of them were ethnologists, anthropologists, highly trained men.
And they also, you know, they really navigated in the West almost independently, like with a guide or two.
And just imagine a tribe looking at these people roaming around in their long black robes, you know, setting up a mission, traveling with them, fighting on their behalf.
At one point, you know, it was Father Lacombe who helped stop the Blackfoot and Cree warring who used to battle on the Battle River in central Alberta.
That was the demarcation line.
I mean, he waded out into a gunfight, calling for them to stop.
And the Blackfoot were calling, stop, stop, to the Cree, you know, stop.
Pale Lacombe is in the middle of the fight, and he actually got wounded in the head.
So, you know, these were peacemakers.
They cared deeply about the Native people that they lived with and worked with and documented their languages and their cultures.
And they also, you know, transferred a lot of Indian culture into their own ceremonies as well, sometimes because it was such a beautiful fit.
So, you know, people who live in condos in downtown wherever in Canada or the U.S. don't know any of this.
They've never read a historical book or they've only read the contemporary ones, which are filled with, you know, genocide, colonial oppression, what bad, horrible people.
And they don't realize that, you know, the Oblate Fathers and Sir John A. MacDonald and other people like that saw that with the secession of the buffalo, all these people would die because that's what they lived on, particularly the plains people.
So they said, you know, we have to find a way to help them survive, and they did.
You know, I'm glad you pointed out the story of Father Lacombe because the town of Watasquin, Alberta is it's Cree name.
It was one of the, it was a name suggested by Father Lacombe, and the name means the hills where peace was made.
It was long before the trend of renaming places to their original Indigenous names.
Father Lacombe suggested that this is the place and we should give it a Cree name because it is the place where peace was made.
And that is the act of one lone Catholic priest doing his best to preserve the culture of the area.
I want to ask you, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is because you have an incredible article in the Western Standard.
You wrote it back in June, but I didn't want our interview to die in the sort of summer dead season of the news.
And we're getting back into the news and this stuff.
And your article is entitled, Before the Priests and the Nuns, When Every Child Did Not Matter.
Tell us about this article because I thought it was incredible.
Well, it's a bit difficult in that there are some rather grisly details, historical details.
But, you know, people don't realize that Native people did not live as sort of noble savages surrounded by riches.
They were living a hunter-gatherer existence.
And in such a context, you can't afford to have weak or extra unuseful people around.
And if you read the Grey Nuns Diaries, which is online as a PDF, you find that the missionary sisters of Mackenzie of the Sacred Heart Hospital saw at a glance what a great field of labor awaited their courage and self-denial.
So a handful of these nuns decided to come west and help the priests.
And they wanted to lift up the people from this form of barbarism.
And so I'm just going to read this passage.
I must give you a few instances to show you what is the depth of moral misery, which we are called to relieve.
What I tell you will shock you to hear, as it sickens me to tell.
It was rather the general custom of the savages in these countries to kill and sometimes eat the orphaned children, especially the little girls.
Religion has made a great change in this respect, but infanticide is still by no means rare.
A mother looking with contempt on her newly born daughter will say, her father has deserted me.
I'm not going to feed her.
So she'll wrap her up in the skin of an animal, smother her, and throw her into the rubbish heap.
Now you understand that all these people would rather have given their children to us, the nuns, than have them killed or let them die.
So that's what they, the nuns did, is they took in orphans, primarily girls, but not only girls.
And, you know, there was a lot of mystical things going on at the time.
For instance, there's another story that there was a little boy, Gabriel.
He was about eight years of age.
He saw his mother kill his father and throw his little brother into the fire.
Gabriel himself was saved from the same fate by his grandmother, who took him to a sicanas named Barbie, who had no children of his own.
But a few days later, Barbie's wife sickened and died.
The sicanas thought Gabriel had brought bad spirits, and so a terrible thing happened.
Barbie left the child alone on the opposite bank of the river with no food or fire, almost naked.
And the grey nuns recount that Barbie took deliberate aim at him, Gabriel, with his gun, whenever he saw the boy wandering around the grave or coming to the water to drink or pulling up roots to satisfy his hunger.
So a passing Hudson Bay trader, Boniface Lafferty, heard of the case from the grandmother and he saved the child.
Although he lived with the nuns for a couple of years, he subsequently died.
But you see, it was very different, difficult to have an orphan around because, you know, then you had another mouth to feed.
It would be one thing if they were 15 or 16, they could join the hunt.
Graveyards And Hidden Histories00:08:48
But if you were a baby or a very small child, they called them the weepers because they just let them follow the tribe.
And if they lived, great.
And if they died, okay.
So people don't realize what incredible effort the grey nuns and the priests put into saving the frail and vulnerable.
And that continued right up to the end of the operation of Indian residential schools.
In fact, many of the people who are very critical of these schools were themselves saved from being orphans.
Now, that part is completely excluded from all of this.
You know, there is only one narrative, and despite historical records, because a lot of your journalism relies on the historical records as opposed to the changing stories of the people involved.
Why do you think they're just getting away with changing the story?
Why is that happening?
Well, first of all, it's a huge industry.
I mean, we found out recently, and this is thanks to Nina Green's sharp eye, according to a document that Leah Redcrow of the Blue Quills First Nation wrote, archaeologist Scott Hamilton wrote the truth and reconciliation calls for action.
I think it was numbers 72 to 76, which basically say we have to dig up every grave and return everybody home.
Well, you know, he's an archaeologist, and that would appear to be a form of self-dealing.
And if you look at the historical record, most of the children who did die at residential schools, and remember, there was a lot of TB going around at the time, and thousands of Canadians of every stripe died of tuberculosis in those days.
But anyway, most of the children who did die, there is a death certificate, is signed by a parent, and the child's body was sent home to the reserve.
So most of these bands are digging around in former community church graveyards.
So what would happen in the settlement of the Canadian West is that a missionary would come here, an Oblate priest, most likely, and set up a mission post.
So he'd set up like a little church in his little house and he would consecrate some ground.
And that became the place where people of the community, if they died, they were buried there.
And so many of these graves are unmarked now, of course, because time, you know, time and the fact that many of the relatives also passed away because of things like TB or they moved away.
And so no one was there to maintain the family graveyard.
Anyway, over time, the mission outpost grew and often an Indian residential school was placed near or on the same site.
But that doesn't mean that the graves in the community graveyard are those of Indian residential school students.
Most of those students, if they died, were sent home for burial on the reserve.
Most of the people in the community graveyards where people are saying, oh, we've got 300 unmarked graves here, those graves are probably your relative, Sheila, and mine.
And the other point I want to make is regarding the find, so-called find in Kamloops.
No one did prior land use review before issuing their statement.
And the land use review shows that the same area where the claim of 215 unmarked graves or mass graves are found is where there used to be septic field trenches.
And they match up pretty closely.
So even the Kamloops First Nation in now three years after the original declaration that human remains had been found, children as young as three, they issued a statement on the anniversary this year saying that they had found anomalies, which is a far cry from a mass grave, human remains and three-year-old children.
So, you know, but it's a huge, huge business now for Indian residential school survivors, for Indian bands, for the archaeologists, for the lawyers.
All kinds of land claims are being based on this, you know, and Canadians are more or less rolling over and saying, oh my God, we never knew we committed genocide.
Here, take it.
So, you know, it's a atrocity propaganda with benefits.
You know, I'm glad you pointed out the amount of money involved because I think it's $8 million has been to the Kamloops First Nation.
I mean, now with all the contingent liabilities, Canadians are paying something like $76 billion in land claims, class actions.
And, you know, it should be noted that one of the main people involved in the Kamloops find directly benefited from the, I think it was the Day Scholars settlement, which had been stalled out for 12 years prior.
I think it was about nine days to two weeks after the Kamloops claim that was settled.
So everybody got a bunch of money for that.
And there's $320 million in a fund that was put together by the government for this research in unmarked, of unmarked graves in former, in old graveyards.
That was recently, that was issued for, I think, a three or four year period, and they were going to cut it back to $500,000 cap.
Well, no, no, no.
Recently, Tanya Talaga wrote a big article in the Globe and Mail and a number of other activists stood up and said, no, no, no, you know, we need that money.
We have to bring every child home.
Even though most of the children are already at home on reserve in the unmarked grave there.
They've never even produced, they can tell you, allegedly, the ages of these children that are occupying these so-called anomalies.
But as you pointed out in your Medium article on sugarcane, which we'll talk about in a second, they've never produced a list of names.
Right.
Right.
And actually, there was just an article in the Western Standard looking for a family that went missing years ago.
And the Western Standard has their names, has the names of the father, the mother, and the two children.
Indigenous family, they went for a job opportunity, you know, drove someplace in northern BC and they disappeared.
It's like a 35-year-old cold case, but they're still looking and they have their names.
So, you know, if I go to the police and say, I want to find someone, the first thing they're going to say, okay, who's it, you know, what's their name?
Where did you last see them?
Who are they related to?
Where did they live?
So if you're going to claim that there are thousands of missing children, then you better be able to produce a list of their names.
Or one name.
But they haven't even produced a single name.
And, you know, as much as I have a particular dislike for the United Nations, I feel now more so than ever.
One of the things they're really good at is investigating genocides, not real great at preventing them, but investigating genocides after the fact, after they've watched from afar.
And, you know, like they've excavated mass graves in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and all those places to determine who the people are in the graves, how old they are, when they died, and who did it.
And yet, while we are accused of genocide, Genocide, mass genocide.
Nobody's ever said, well, we better bring in the UN genocide investigators, then they know exactly how to do this.
They've even shut out the RCMP.
That's not exactly true.
Commission's Missing Graves00:04:29
Well, first of all, the Kamloops ban did shut out the RCMP.
It was actually Marie Sinclair, who was a former commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
After the announcement, the RCMP went in and started questioning the person who had done the GPR work, Sarah Beaulieu.
And Marie Sinclair and various published documents, I think including statements to the Senate, said that they were being far too aggressive and they were called off the investigation, even though, you know, and you might say, oh, well, that's good because they're probably a bunch of mean white guys.
Well, actually, the supervisor of the detachment was an Indigenous fellow at the time.
So it's not like he didn't have cultural sensitivity.
Anyway, so the RCMP were called off.
And in fact, the federal government at one point, a couple of years ago, contracted with the International Commission on Missing Persons for about $2 million for a contract to help with the grave searches.
Now, they likely did this in good faith, but of course the Indigenous community said, no, we don't want that because you never consulted with us first.
So then they seem to back off for a while.
But in time passing, it seems that certainly the Blue Quills First Nation and Leia Red Crow have continued to work with them.
And there was an online webinar where the Blue Quills people said that they had sent photographs of some bone structures that had been dug up in their graveyard.
And that I think her name is Sonia Blau of the International Commission on Missing Persons.
She said that, yes, this would be sort of the lower part of the cranium and spine of a child under the age of five.
Now this sounds shocking and horrible, but again, the Blue Quills people have been digging in the community graveyard since about 2000 to dig graves, newly dug graves, for members of their tribe who have sadly passed away.
Unfortunately, in the process, they've been digging up old graves and finding all these old skeletons.
And quite a lot of time has gone by and they've found quite a few of them.
So all these human remains are displaced from their original site.
And it is known that that site at Blue Quills, which was formerly Saddle Lake, it is known that there were three typhus epidemics and there are some mass graves there of people who died.
Again, likely pioneer settlers.
And there were two nuns that died as well.
Their bodies were buried there.
They have been exhumed and moved to consecrated ground elsewhere by the church.
So, you know, like everything, there's always a bit of truth to it.
Yes, there are bodies.
Yes, there are unmarked graves.
Yes, there are some mass graves, but no, there's no evidence of genocide and there's no list of missing persons.
So you would think that the first thing the International Commission on Missing Persons would do is say, okay, where's the list?
Because then you can start going through all the historical archaeological archival records and saying, okay, here's a birth record for this person by this name, and here's a death record for them.
And look, it says right here that they're buried in this place.
Or you can look and say, well, here's a birth record for this person, and here's their family, and here's the census from the year that people claim they went missing.
They don't appear on the census after that, and we don't find a burial record.
So then you can, you know, through a lot of the archival documents, you can pinpoint who, when, where, and what.
And then you go to the newspaper archives, you go, oh, look, there was a terrible car accident in BC and the entire family died there and they're buried there.
So, you know, there are things like this that, you know, really narrow down the search, but you need that name of the missing person or at least their family.
Incinerated Bodies Mystery00:08:42
Now, of course, what's happened in the meantime is that Chief Tiji of the BC First Nations Assembly, I think it was on City News.
He was interviewed and someone asked him about why haven't you found or have you found any remains?
And he said, well, no, we haven't, you know, and there have been quite a few excavations in Canada, no remains found, no graves.
And he said, well, that's probably because the bodies were incinerated at the school.
And that brings us to sugarcane.
Right.
Tell us about sugarcane because sugarcane is just one of a few documentaries out there that are making the rounds that appear to be rewriting history.
And the people in the documentaries are contradicting their prior statements that they made publicly.
They've just decided there's a camera in front of me now.
This is a really controversial thing happening in Canada.
There's a lot of money involved.
So I'm going to change my story.
And that's happened in Sugarcane.
That's happened in another documentary as well.
Yeah, well, sugarcane is a particularly high profile.
First of all, National Geographic has picked it up.
Secondly, the directors, the co-directors are a young woman named Emily Cassie, who's got very high profile credentials.
Emmy Award nominee, Peabody nominee, also has worked with very high profile magazines in the United States.
She's also a Canadian originally from Toronto.
And her co-director is Julian Noise Cat, Julian Brave Noise Cat.
And he's a fairly high profile climate activist in the States.
Bill McGibbon wrote an article about him for Time magazine.
His mother is a high-profile, very powerful executive in high-tech.
At one point, she was working with IBM.
I'm not sure where she is right now.
So, you know, these are not ordinary people.
And apparently, Emily Cassie was gut punched by the news of the Kamloops find and decided to try and track down another band that was doing such research, like GPR research, ground-penetrating radar.
And by chance, found the Williams Lake Band was about to do that.
Sent an email to Chief Willie Sellers.
He responded immediately.
And it turns out, serendipity, that the Williams Lake Band also owns an archaeological excavation company called Sugar Cane Excavations, which was set up in 2016.
Anyway, maybe that's just a coincidence.
Sugarcane is the name of the reserve, Indian Reserve, near Williams Lake and near St. Joseph's Mission, which became St. Joseph's Indian Residential School.
The formal name for it is the Caribou Industrial Residential School.
Most people refer to it as St. Joseph's.
But if you're looking for information on it on the National Truth and National Center for Truth and Reconciliation, it's under Caribou Industrial Residential School.
So here's the big thread.
The premise is that priests at St. Joseph's impregnated young girls and burned the unwanted babies in the school incinerator.
And the proof of this supposedly, the way that the story is framed in the documentary, is the father of Julian Brave Noisecat.
His name is Ed Archie Noisecat.
He's a very well-known and very clever Indigenous carving artist.
He does beautiful work.
But both these people knew before they made the film and both of them had written about the fact that Ed's father is actually a man named Ray Peters, who is also an Indigenous fellow who had seven other children with Ed's mother and fathered 17 children in total with five women.
So not a priest.
But if you look at the film reviews, you'll find that film critics across North America are quite convinced that Ed was the product of a priest and that he's just lucky to have escaped the incinerator at the school.
So, you know, sadly, in the way the story is told in the documentary, they skip over some important details.
They show the Williams Lake Tribune article of August 26, 1959.
And in it, it tells this tragic story of how the dairyman, Antonius Stoop, I think his name was, came home late and he happened to hear a strange sound coming from the garbage burner on site, went to investigate because he thought maybe a cat had gotten trapped in there and found this abandoned baby.
And what had happened is Ed's mother and perhaps the father, I'm not too sure if he was with her, they were driving home from Williams Lake to their reserve at Canum Lake.
And maybe she went into labor prematurely.
Maybe they hoped to find a registered nurse on site at the school because there usually would be, maybe, but not during the summer days.
Anyway, they abandoned, she or they abandoned the baby in the incinerator.
And Antonio Stoop, the dairyman, saved it, took it to the Williams Lake Hospital, and baby Ed survived.
The mother was tracked down subsequently.
She claimed that she thought the baby was dead and that's why she abandoned it.
You know, who knows?
These are very difficult times.
But the key point is she was 20 years old and schools ended for all children when they turned 16.
So she was not a student at the school.
She was involved with Ray Peters already.
They married that year.
I don't know if they married immediately after.
It appears they may have been living common law before.
I don't know.
And the baby in the incinerator had nothing to do with a priest.
But that's not how the story is framed.
And I'd also like to say I think it's highly unethical because one of the principal characters in the film is Charlene Bellot.
And Charlene is related to the woman who had the baby.
Charlene knows this story inside out and backwards, but she is presented as an investigator as if they're going to find out, you know, who's the dad, right?
When everybody knew.
It's a very small community.
Everyone knew.
And this was a deep wound for everyone in that community.
In fact, at one point early on in the film, Julian's father, Ed, who was the baby.
in the incinerator or garbage burner is more correct, you know, Ed says to him, what do you want from me?
And Julian's like, well, I want to know the truth about what happened to you.
And he says, it just keeps on damaging.
And here we have this story, in my view.
It is horribly damaging.
It's damaging to Canada's reputation.
It's damaging to the community involved.
It's damaging to the Roman Catholic Church.
It's incitement.
And so much of it is false.
That's the problem.
It's not a documentary.
It's a shockumentary.
And actually, in one interview that they did, someone said, well, why did you decide to do this documentary now?
And they said, well, because the residential school story of Kamloops was waning.
So the intention was to once again hype up the mass graves, genocide.
And what do you need for genocide?
Well, you know, the whole principle of the Canadian genocide is that children were forcibly taken from their parents and put in residential schools, which is not true.
DNA Test Controversy00:05:50
Most children had to be enrolled by their parents.
There was a wait list in many cases.
They needed a medical exam.
The children who may have been taken away are those who are orphaned, whose families were destitute, or who were at risk of domestic violence.
Because prior to the 1960s, the residential schools functioned as the social safety net for families in distress.
And people don't realize that.
There was no social services before mid-60s.
And this is where children in distress from Indigenous communities were placed because there was nowhere else for them.
There was no foster care system.
No.
Particularly in these communities.
And in fact, it kept the kids in the community connected to their culture.
I'm curious, in this documentary, did they ever once do what they've been doing on daytime television for the better part of two decades?
Did somebody say, let's get a DNA test to see if you are a sibling of your siblings, with the shared father?
Or did they say, okay, let's see if we can track down the living relative of this priest?
Because I'm willing to bet, given the size of Catholic families back then, I bet he has a ton of living relatives.
Can we track them down and see if you are related to this man?
Did they ever try to do the basic of investigation?
Well, they did, actually.
Good point.
Apparently, Emily Cassie, the director, apparently she lived with the former chief, whose name is Rick Gilbert and his wife, Anna.
Apparently, she lived with them for about two years during the making of the film.
And that struck me as odd when I was watching the film that somehow someone gained access to Rick Gilbert and his wife looking at a DNA test on a laptop.
And I guess it's because Cassie had ingratiated herself into their lives.
So they had done that basic search.
Now, You know, when you get these things and they pop up and they say you have, you have five more relatives.
Oh, well, we're not, you know, we're not even talking about like an actual DNA test.
We're just doing 23andMe, I guess.
Yeah, no, they did some kind of actual DNA test.
I couldn't, I only saw the film twice, so I was not able to actually detail what they found.
But a person pops up on screen named McGrath and he goes, you may be related to McGrath.
So this young fellow pops up and then in the film they cut to a picture of Father McGrath standing beside a bunch of kids from St. Joseph's and everyone goes, see, you know, you were fathered by a priest.
So I thought, you know, that's interesting.
Let's look at the demographics of Williams Lake.
And see what they'd said is that he had about 45% Native heritage and, I don't know, 23, 33, 5%, whatever Scottish, Irish, English kind of heritage.
So I looked at the demographics of Williams Lake area.
And even to this day, the ethnicity there is enormously Scottish, Irish, English.
So, you know, at that point in time, Rick's mother was 18.
So also she was not a student at St. Joseph's.
And, you know, that was an area, Williams Lake was an area where young men were pouring into there, building the railway, prospecting, logging, mining, ranching, a rodeo.
You know, there are literally thousands of other McGrath heritage people who could have been his father.
Now, it could have been a priest, but she was not a student at the school.
So they would have had to have an illicit off-site relationship of some kind, which in a small community, you know, that's not very easy to accomplish back in the day, right?
So again, they made this very simplistic connection.
And sadly, from my point of view, they also followed him to the Vatican, where he was part of the group that received an apology from the Pope.
But he went and met with the Superior General of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Order of the Oblates that was here.
I believe the fellow's name was Louis Logan.
I'm not sure if I pronounced that correctly.
He met with him and sort of made a public confession to him that his mother was abused by a priest and that's why he exists.
That's why he's here, because he's the product of a priest who broke his vows and had illicit sex with his mother.
But as I said, his mother was 18, not a student at the school anymore, and it could have been any people in the area.
I mean, imagine a handsome rodeo cowboy comes to town, you're at the rodeo, you fall in love for the night, then he moves on.
Well, you know, it's not unusual in that time either.
I mean, you know, if you look at the history.
I said it's not unusual in this time.
That's true, but today there are contraceptives, so sometimes, yeah.
But, you know, even Joni Mitchell, she was 21 and she had a baby.
And I was just reading an article about her.
And she said, you know, I couldn't support the child at all.
Common Abandonments Past00:10:26
So I gave her up for adoption.
So, you know, it was a very common situation at that time.
And we're looking at it with presentism, you know.
Plus, these people are framing the whole story as if all these people were victims of crazy priests, nefarious acts, and incinerating babies.
So if you look at the genocide narrative that they've come up with, one aspect is one of the five principles of genocide, which is to tear children from their community and force them to go to another community.
As I said, most of the parents approved of it.
In other instances, the children were saved from domestic violence or destitution or from being an orphan.
And I tell you, some of the communities in that area, like Alkali Lake, 100% of the population were alcoholics at one point, including the children, 100%.
Now, Charlene Bellow knows that community well.
She lived there.
And she even celebrated the fact that the community healed itself in a film that was made in, I think it was made in the 60s.
I can send a link to it.
So at the end of the film, they all gave each other awards for having both acted in their film that documents their recovery and also that they recovered.
So anyway, you can see that there were a lot of children that might have been in trouble.
The other thing for genocide is, you know, missing persons.
Well, we don't have a list of names.
The other thing is that mass graves, well, we have these claims, unmarked graves, you know, that would mean intentionally unmarked graves.
The graves that everyone is talking about are graves that were marked, but over time the wooden crosses and headstones disintegrated.
So nobody dug a grave and nefariously never marked it.
They marked it, but it's 100 years later.
And, you know, you need bodies and there's no bodies.
So what else do you need?
You need ashes.
So this sugar cane provides the ashes for the final link in the genocide claim.
Although, as I've shown you, it's completely false.
Pretty darn convenient.
Michelle, I can talk to you all day about this.
I want to ask you one last question.
People will say, Michelle, you're painting the residential school system as just all sun and light.
But I've never heard you deny that there were problems in the residential school system ever, not even once.
But I think there were problems in the school system in general with discipline or whatever.
In earlier times, my brother got the strap.
There's no way in heck they would give kids the strap these days.
Things change and what is considered abuse now is not considered abuse at the time.
That's very true.
And there were problems at some of the schools.
There were problems at St. Joseph's.
There were some predatory priests.
There were some who were also charged and convicted.
So it's not like people were not caring at all.
There's one factor that people never talk about, and that is student on student abuse, which is quite prevalent.
And we know that also from the British boarding school experience.
We know that also from schools, ordinary schools.
You know, you'll get people who are real bullies.
And if they get a chance, they'll physically or sexually assault a weaker kid.
At one point in Pauline Dempsey's article about my life in Indian residential school.
She talks about the fact that in her school, which was on the Blackfoot Reserve, the nuns would keep the smaller boys in the girls' dorm until they were old enough because they didn't want, you know, predatory older boys taking advantage of them.
So, you know, these things did happen, and it's a tragedy.
But, you know, also when you look at what was happening back home on reserve many times, there were very many tragic instances of incest, sexual assault, neglect, neglect on a scale that's incomprehensible, where, you know, a mother might go out on a binge and leave children alone for like five days.
The social worker would arrive and find a baby in a diaper, the diaper frozen to the floor.
So, you know, it's a grim picture, and people never want to look at that picture.
So, I agree that some people suffered greatly at Indian residential schools.
I would like to suggest that many of the people who suffered deep emotional scars, it's more related to the fact that they were recently orphaned.
And I think that this may be where a lot of this focus on graves comes from.
Because if you're four or five years old and you're orphaned and you've gone to a funeral where you've seen your parents die perhaps right in front of you, and then suddenly you're transported to this new environment where things are very strict and regimented, completely different from your regular life, you can imagine how jarring that would be for a small child and how embedded those memories would remain.
So, I think people should look at Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson's interview with Francis Wittowson on Rational Spaces.
He's an Indigenous psychologist, and he said that yes, there is what he calls residential school syndrome in some people, not all people.
He likens it to a form of post-traumatic stress, but he completely rejects the genocide narrative.
And he's dealt with literally hundreds of former residential school students and Native people who are going through recovery.
And one other thing I wanted to mention is that he also said, you know, we should honor the Catholic and Christian traditions that many of the older people and younger people in the Indigenous community find strength in.
You know, people are like, oh, we have to go back to our traditional culture.
It's a very small percentage of people who practice traditional Indian culture and spirituality in Canada.
The much greater percentage is Catholicism and Christianity, and it aligns with societal values.
So, you know, I think that a lot of Native people on reserve are really trapped, held hostage, if you like, by the genocide narrative and the vehement hatred toward our history when they themselves found their faith to be very useful and fulfilling.
So blah, blah, blah.
Oh, and I have a new t-shirt.
Every living child matters most of all.
I think that we need to change the narrative from every child matters most of all to every living child matters most of all, because our children, off reserve and on reserve, are dying from fentanyl, from alcohol, from suicide.
And these are the children we can help now.
We can't help anybody who's in the grave.
Michelle, how do people see more of your independent journalism on this topic?
I'm on Medium, which is kind of a blog site.
And I have my own blog called MichelleSterling.com.
And you're frequently published in the Western Standard on this topic as well, which I think is great.
So the more people that see your work, the better.
I think as Canadians, we are made to feel guilty for our past.
And I think it is nothing short of an outstanding accomplishment of human achievement that we can even live in this country and in this climate, let alone thrive the way that we do.
And we should, by and large, look back on the past of this country as a piece of success.
Now, dark times, of course.
In the building of every great society, there are dark times.
But I don't think we should be ashamed.
And I don't think we should be teaching our children to be ashamed of things they never did.
I agreed.
Great.
Well, Michelle, thank you for this.
We'll have you back on the show very soon on, I'm sure, a different topic, as you sometimes are.
And just thank you so much for taking the time to do this work.
I know it is truly a labor of love in that it is your love of the truth that drives this work.
And my love of children.
Well, we've come to the portion of the show wherein we invite your viewer feedback.
Unlike the mainstream media, we don't exist without you.
So why wouldn't we want to know what you think about the work that we do here at Rebel News?
Today's letter comes to me by way of email.
If you want to send me an email about the show today, for better or for worse, you can send that to Sheila at RebelNews.com.
But if you're watching a free clip of the show, put your comments in the YouTube or the Rumble pages and I will take a look at those as well.
Virtual Genders Discussed00:04:24
I frequently pull comments from there.
But as I said, today is from the email inbox.
It is on last week's show with my friend Lise Merle.
She's a Saskatchewan mom of six who is slapped with a $30,000 access to information bill because she asks what local bureaucrats in her local school board were saying about her family behind her back.
And she asked for any of their communications about the new Pride initiatives.
And this is one school board, one family, one mom.
And they also told her if they calculated it in a different way, that it would be closer to $200,000.
So they were doing her a favor by sticking up this paywall to look for digital documents, digital, like keyword search stuff.
I mean, just absolute utter baloney.
But anyway, my email was full of supportive emails about my interview with Lise because she's a mom just wanting to get answers.
And this is how they stonewall you.
So I've got an email here from Dale who says, Dear Sheila, first of all, thank you for taking up the news that the media is lying about and hiding from Canadians.
And secondly, I have nothing but empathy for your friend who wants to know what is being taught to her children.
Then we get a personal disclosure.
I'm a middle-aged married gay guy.
I'm sick to death of the misinformation around trans rights.
And I strongly disagree with the TQIA plus side of the pride flag.
In fact, I would like to see the TQIA plus removed from the LGB flag.
Gay and bi people are not transsexuals.
We are not girl men or man women.
We are men and women who are attracted to the same sex that we were born with.
In fact, in their own data, these people admit that something like 80 to 90% of these trans and other gender kids are just gay kids.
Yeah, it's the new conversion therapy, isn't it?
I take a dim view of this and consider these interventions harmful to gay people.
They're trying to trans the gay away.
For context, in Saudi Arabia, they will pay for gay people to have a sex change.
They do it in Iran too.
They say, look, we have no gay people.
Then you have this Franken lady behind a hijab who was just a regular old gay kid.
If you do not, you will be killed violently.
Why are we taking cues from this?
Most of these acronyms have been added to the LGB flag are sexual fetishes.
They are not sexes and nor are they genders.
A way of looking at this is that they are virtual genders.
Women do not have penises and men do not have vaginas.
It's a biological fact, inarguable.
And then he includes a link to the WPATH files.
I have read these.
These are leaked documents from a gender-affirming clinic in the UK which has subsequently closed.
When these facts were revealed in Europe, some countries immediately changed the law.
I tried to add the link to your YouTube interview, but it was quickly removed.
Of course it was.
YouTube is a censorship platform.
So here you go.
These should be spread around for as many parents to see as possible.
It is a long document.
I think this information is being suppressed in Canada.
It is.
Please tell your friend, and I will, and I did.
I sent her this email and she was very appreciative of it, Dale, that she has an ally in me and keep up the good reporting.
Oh, I will.
I sure will.
You know, you used to be able to search doctors in your area who were doing gender-affirming care on the WPATH files.
And that was quickly scrubbed.
And that's too bad because I would never want to send my kids to a pediatrician who would give them gender-affirming care instead of just proper medical care.
Right?
I feel like I should be provided that conscience right, but I guess not in Canada.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time in the same place next week.