From a tweet made by Sean Carleton:
https://twitter.com/SeanCarleton/status/1787585939390566462

In Winnipeg, the defence team now plans to argue Skibicki’s mental disorder led him to kill 4 Indigenous women, it’s important to note, as @Niigaanwewidam does, that he was spreading the “mass grave hoax” online at the time: https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/2022/12/07/fomenting-hate-sets-stage-for-heinous-criminals-devastating-acts

Residential school denialists will plead that they are just “asking questions,” but the far-right conspiracies they are cooking up (i.e. the debunked “mass grave hoax”) often manifest in acts of anti-Indigenous hatred: https://theconversation.com/we-fact-checked-residential-school-denialists-and-debunked-their-mass-grave-hoax-theory-213435

Skibicki posting links to the mass grave hoax on Facebook is just one example of this kind of concerning behaviour. In the past two years, we’ve seen vandalism of residential school monuments:

We’ve witnessed a man drive his vehicle through a march of IRS Survivors:

We’ve seen political “leaders” spread/defend/hold space for residential school denialism to whip up anti-Indigenous hatred among their far-right supporters:

As

@kahnasatake reported last summer in her interim report, people showed up at the Kamloops Residential School at night with shovels demanding to dig for proof of unmarked graves: https://osi-bis.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/OSI_InterimReport_June-2023_WEB.pdf

Skibicki may be suffering from a mental illness, but as this trial proceeds we must not let the dangerous anti-Indigenous conspiracies he helped promote become normalized. The hatred/fear of Indigenous Peoples is part of the settler psyche – especially on the far-right today.

In terms of ways forward, of putting truth and compassion before reconciliation and getting out of the colonial cul-de-sac of hate,

@Niigaanwewidam puts it eloquently here, and offers a call to action for all of us: