The media actually did a pretty good job of covering the Pope's apology. And Wendy Mesley's re-branding as a woman of ill repute. Karyn Pugliese co-hosts.

Cindy Blackstock was always aware that Indigenous children in Canada were treated differently, that their mistreatment and deaths were accepted as the status quo. This is the story of what she did about it.

The confirmations of graves at residential schools have made an abstract horror specific and tangible. And that tangibility is what Glavin's piece...

Ostensibly the idea was to do media criticism. That is what the article, The Year Of The Graves, in the National Post set out to do: correct errors in how the discovery of unmarked graves was reported. But that was not its impact.

What does an apology mean? And what happens next? Fatima speaks to two people who were in Rome to hear the Pope’s apology to Indigenous people over the Residential School system: Norman Yak’e ula, a survivor who has been waiting for 58 years to hear these words; and Taylor Behn-Tsakoza, co-chair of the Assembly of First Nations National Youth Council, who was part of the delegation that got an audience with the Pope. 

Three generations of Indigenous panelists join us this week on what The Backbench thought was the biggest story of 2021: the unmarked graves on former residential school grounds. We break format to take stock of what has been promised and repromised, the diversity of demands from Indigenous communities, and what a new "interlocutor" position can do to help with healing.

The 'saying-stuff business' gets some clarity from different courts regarding what one can and cannot express online; the results may surprise you. And former prime minister Jean Chrétien gets the media to let him off the hook for his involvement with residential schools for a brief moment. 

Teachers accused of abusing Indigenous children at Catholic schools are among us. John Furlong is quoted regularly in the press as the man leading a possible Vancouver bid for the 2030 Olympics. It's as if the people accusing him of physical and sexual abuse don't exist. Today we hear Jesse's original 2014 conversation with journalist Laura Robinson, who broke the Furlong story, and an update about all that has happened since, and why the upcoming tribunal on the case may be different.

Charles Adler on learning about and living with Canada's legacy of Residential Schools

The media is fixated on whether to celebrate Canada Day as the Lower Kootenay First Nation announces the discovery of another 182 unmarked graves in BC. And after recording, Lytton BC began evacuation and we’re trying to understand what a heat dome is.