Orange is the new black

What it's like in an Orwellian world where compliance is demanded

Happy Halloween to one and all, an occasion whose orange colour has been culturally and politically appropriated by indigenous activists. Despite its many unfounded and nasty accusations, Orange Shirt Day, more formally known as The National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, September 30, which might also be called “Hate Canada Day,” “Lock up the Deniers Day,” or “Indigenous Halloween,” has come and gone with little or no pushback from ordinary Canadians perhaps because it is a welcome day off work for so many people.

Because of this lack of rejection, the day’s painful legacy of falsehoods and recrimination will remain with us.

One example of this legacy is the unsubstantiated assertion made by Kimberly Murray, Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools, that residential school “denialists” were behind an incident on the Kamloops Indian Reserve one of her reports described as follows:

“Denialists entered the site without permission. Some came in the middle of the night, carrying shovels; they said they wanted to ‘see for themselves’ if children are buried there.”

Photo of Hymie Rubenstein’s Orange Shirt Day-cum-Halloween t-shirt. The decal is compliments of Temu.

Terry Glavin of the National Post remarked about this accusation as follows:

There was no report of this to the RCMP. We are not invited to know when this happened or to whom these interlopers explained their wicked intentions or who they might have been, exactly. We are simply expected to believe it in the same way Murray’s report asks us to believe the Tk’emlups’ community initially intended to simply fence off the old apple orchard where a ground-penetrating radar survey detected anomalies that were presumed to be graves, so that certain former residential school students, “the ones that buried the children” in the first place, could come and pay their respects.

What? There are people still alive who were among the students in those lurid stories about children being woken up in the middle of the night to bury their classmates? Who are these people? Can we speak to them? Have they spoken to the police?

This isn’t to say this story is to be disbelieved or believed. It’s just to notice that we are simply told to believe and be quiet or we’ll be guilty of genocide denial by re-traumatizing survivors with protocol-snubbing questions that quite a few leading T’Kemlups community members have been asking, too, to no avail.

To paraphrase Glavin, incorrectly or not, “Trick or treat,” where the trick is the only treat, sums up the indigenous transformation of Halloween.

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The piece on the other side of the paywall written by Dr. James McMurtry, an accomplished educator fired for the “crime” of daring to expose the trick by telling the truth to his students about the scary Halloween-inspired Kamloops Indian Residential School allegations, reveals other features of this fake and hateful legacy.

I deliberately saved it for October 31 because Halloween is the night for gruesome horror stories invented and transmitted not to enlighten people but to seduce them with their Big Lie contents.