Masks, Media, and the Message
Who Marshals Whom?
October 1, 2026
What happened
At about 7:25 a.m. on Sunday, September 27, a group of masked men dressed head to toe in
black gathered near Chief Eli Larue Way, close to the former Kamloops Indian Residential
School. Police confronted them there and tracked them as they moved through the city. Hours
later, men who appeared to be the same group stood on the Pacific Way overpass above the
Trans-Canada Highway holding a banner that read “Got bones?”
The timing was deliberate or at least unmistakable: three days before the National Day for Truth
and Reconciliation, and five years after the 2021 announcement that turned Kamloops into the
symbolic centre of Canada’s residential school reckoning. Within 48 hours the RCMP, city
council, the First Nation and every major B.C. party leader had condemned it, and the story was
running nationally.
How many men were there depends on who is counting. Castanet reported “more than a dozen”;
Culture Alberta put it at about 30; a local observer who studied two photographs counted 19,
possibly 20. That gap is the first sign that this is a story as much about how an event gets told as
about the event itself.
The official response
The condemnation was fast and furious, but no charge has been laid, and police have not named
an offence.
- Kamloops RCMP. Supt. Jeff Pelley called the banner plus masks “a cowardly attempt to
avoid accountability for actions and messages that are clearly intended to intimidate, provoke
fear and division.” Staff Sgt. Andy Lot said only: “We’re looking into the matter, we’re still
investigating.” Police have asked the public for photos, video and word of any future
gatherings. - Chief Rosanne Casimir and the Nation. The Nation’s statement said “the presence of
individuals associated with white supremacist and white nationalist activity in our community is
deeply concerning.” The Nation issued a safety warning and began a security review, and said
white supremacy “will not instill fear” in survivors. - Kamloops city council. Council called it “an act of racism and intimidation that has no place
in the community” and a “painful reminder” that reconciliation work is unfinished. - Provincial leaders. The leaders of the NDP, Conservatives, Greens and Centre BC all issued
statements against it. B.C. Conservative interim leader Lorne Doerkson called the gathering
“hateful and meant to intimidate.” - Advocacy groups. The Kamloops Aboriginal Friendship Society and others used the moment
to call for federal legislation against residential school denialism. - Prime Minister Mark Carney. On Sept. 28 he called it a “cowardly act” and “abhorrent,”
adding: “My thoughts are with everyone who are shaken and hurt by this disgusting display of
hate.” - Syilx Okanagan Nation. In an open letter, tribal chair Clarence Louie wrote: “This denialism
will not divide our nations or erase our histories.”
Briefing city council on Sept. 29, Pelley said officers “focused on those individuals” through the
day. “They were there to intimidate and incite fear and we take that very seriously,” he said,
adding that no arrests were made because the investigation was “in its infancy.”
Who they are said to be
Nearly every outlet has tied the group to Second Sons Canada, but the published reports
describe the men as “believed” or “appearing” to be associated with it rather than citing a claim of
responsibility.
The basis offered so far is the look: white face coverings, black clothing, caps, flags and a banner
stunt on an overpass. That is the same uniform presentation Second Sons has used at
cenotaphs, monuments and overpasses from Dartmouth to Sudbury to the Alberta foothills since
its first public appearance in March 2025.
The academic framing arrived almost as fast as the police statements, though not quite as
furious. On September 29, the eve of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Canadian
Dimension published an excerpt under the names of University of Manitoba historian Sean
Carleton and Anishinaabe scholar Niigaan Sinclair. The piece opens with an italic introduction,
written in the magazine’s voice, saying it follows “a gathering of masked white nationalists” near
Kamloops “where members of Second Sons Canada displayed a banner invoking residential
school denialism.”
What follows that introduction is not a response to Kamloops. It is the conclusion of Carleton and
Sinclair’s new edited collection, Truth Before Reconciliation: Confronting Residential School
Denialism (University of Manitoba Press, 2026), and it never mentions Kamloops, the banner or
Second Sons. The excerpt notes that Canada has completed only 15 of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action, warns of rising anti-Indigenous racism and
denialism, and prescribes education under the book’s principle: truth before reconciliation.
Carleton, an associate professor of History and Indigenous Studies, has spent years tracking
denialist rhetoric and is among the most quoted Canadian academics on the subject.
So the Second Sons link, stated as fact without the “believed” or “appearing” qualifiers found in
the other media reports, appears to be the magazine’s own editorial framing on September 29,
then attached to their names and to a book written before the event.
As of September 30, the Second Sons had not publicly claimed the Kamloops event.
What some locals are saying
Away from the podiums, not every resident reads the event the way officials do. Some see a
small, amateurish stunt inflated by the coverage.
One man who spoke on condition of anonymity thinks the masks, not the men, made the story.
“The reason it drew attention is what they were wearing,” he said. “Their faces were covered, so it
gave the impression they were up to bad stuff.” In his view, “if these guys weren’t masked and
they wore regular clothes,” there would probably have been no news story at all.
Another anonymous person suspects the performance was the whole point. “The action is part of
the message. Maybe the biggest part of the message. They’re not really conveying any
information by doing this. Just the presence.” Another dismissed them as “wannabes” and
expects the story to “just go away.”
Someone asked whether the coverage would have been the same if the masked men had been
Indigenous or South Asian, and called the instant reaction “stereotyping. Automatically thinking
they’re just a bunch of white radical white supremacists. Maybe they are, maybe they’re not.” His
broader frustration is with “people that are uneducated and misinformed, ready to point fingers,
yet they know nothing about the situation.”
A longtime resident of Falkland said the event lands on an older resentment over the 2021
announcement. “There’s a lot of issues with the native situation, and it started in Kamloops,” he
said. “They’re mourning a situation they cannot prove happened. And it’s got a lot of people
annoyed and frustrated with the social mess.”
A North Okanagan man, who also asked not to be named, put the case for restraint bluntly. “Why
even bring it up?” he said of the grave claims. “You’re starting [trouble] by doing that.” Asked
whether the same logic applied to the men on the overpass, he agreed that it did.
The fallout reached well past the overpass. A school bus driver was due to take students to a
council event later this week, which has been cancelled because of the gathering.
Someone else was skeptical of how the day itself played out. A free hot-dog event in Vernon for
the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, he said, drew mostly white residents, and he
questioned how involved Indigenous people were in it.
Those views run into a hard fact. The banner did say something: “Got bones?” A direct reference
to the unmarked-graves claim, displayed on the Nation’s own doorstep days before a national
day of mourning.
Media messaging
The coverage of Kamloops got the essentials right, but it moved faster than its evidence on two
points and slower than it should have on one.
Faster on identity. Almost every headline named Second Sons or “white nationalists” within a
day. The link is plausible given the group’s uniform and track record, but the reports rest on
appearance and “belief,” not a claim or a police finding.
Faster on scale. Counts ran from “more than a dozen” to 30. A group of that size got national
treatment normally reserved for organized threats. That serves the group: attention is the product
such groups are built to generate.
Slower on the message. Much commentary treated the masks as the offence. The banner was
the substance. Critics who say the men “weren’t doing anything wrong” are right that no crime
was committed. They are not right that nothing was said.
The result is a familiar ‘Canadian’ loop. A group stages a provocation; officials and media amplify
it; the amplification becomes proof, to sympathizers, that dissent is being stereotyped and
silenced; and a stalled denialism law gains fresh momentum. The question is whether anyone
gets a clearer picture of what happened on that overpass. And for those still attempting to
understand Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message and the moment. — Rudiger
