avoid accountability for actions and messages that are clearly intended to intimidate, provoke
fear and division.\u201d Staff Sgt. Andy Lot said only: \u201cWe\u2019re looking into the matter, we\u2019re still
investigating.\u201d Police have asked the public for photos, video and word of any future
gatherings.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
individuals associated with white supremacist and white nationalist activity in our community is
deeply concerning.\u201d The Nation issued a safety warning and began a security review, and said
white supremacy \u201cwill not instill fear\u201d in survivors.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
in the community\u201d and a \u201cpainful reminder\u201d that reconciliation work is unfinished.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
statements against it. B.C. Conservative interim leader Lorne Doerkson called the gathering
\u201chateful and meant to intimidate.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n
to call for federal legislation against residential school denialism.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
adding: \u201cMy thoughts are with everyone who are shaken and hurt by this disgusting display of
hate.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n
will not divide our nations or erase our histories.\u201d
Briefing city council on Sept. 29, Pelley said officers \u201cfocused on those individuals\u201d through the
day. \u201cThey were there to intimidate and incite fear and we take that very seriously,\u201d he said,
adding that no arrests were made because the investigation was \u201cin its infancy.\u201d
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 \u201cbelieved\u201d or \u201cappearing\u201d 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\u2019s voice, saying it follows \u201ca gathering of masked white nationalists\u201d near
Kamloops \u201cwhere members of Second Sons Canada displayed a banner invoking residential
school denialism.\u201d
What follows that introduction is not a response to Kamloops. It is the conclusion of Carleton and
Sinclair\u2019s 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\u2019s 94 Calls to Action, warns of rising anti-Indigenous racism and
denialism, and prescribes education under the book\u2019s 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 \u201cbelieved\u201d or \u201cappearing\u201d qualifiers found in
the other media reports, appears to be the magazine\u2019s 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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
One man who spoke on condition of anonymity thinks the masks, not the men, made the story.
\u201cThe reason it drew attention is what they were wearing,\u201d he said. \u201cTheir faces were covered, so it
gave the impression they were up to bad stuff.\u201d In his view, \u201cif these guys weren\u2019t masked and
they wore regular clothes,\u201d there would probably have been no news story at all.
Another anonymous person suspects the performance was the whole point. \u201cThe action is part of
the message. Maybe the biggest part of the message. They\u2019re not really conveying any
information by doing this. Just the presence.\u201d Another dismissed them as \u201cwannabes\u201d and
expects the story to \u201cjust go away.\u201d
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 \u201cstereotyping. Automatically thinking
they\u2019re just a bunch of white radical white supremacists. Maybe they are, maybe they\u2019re not.\u201d His
broader frustration is with \u201cpeople that are uneducated and misinformed, ready to point fingers,
yet they know nothing about the situation.\u201d
A longtime resident of Falkland said the event lands on an older resentment over the 2021
announcement. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of issues with the native situation, and it started in Kamloops,\u201d he
said. \u201cThey\u2019re mourning a situation they cannot prove happened. And it\u2019s got a lot of people
annoyed and frustrated with the social mess.\u201d
A North Okanagan man, who also asked not to be named, put the case for restraint bluntly. \u201cWhy
even bring it up?\u201d he said of the grave claims. \u201cYou\u2019re starting [trouble] by doing that.\u201d 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: \u201cGot bones?\u201d A direct reference
to the unmarked-graves claim, displayed on the Nation\u2019s 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 \u201cwhite nationalists\u201d within a
day. The link is plausible given the group\u2019s uniform and track record, but the reports rest on
appearance and \u201cbelief,\u201d not a claim or a police finding.
Faster on scale. Counts ran from \u201cmore than a dozen\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Slower on the message. Much commentary treated the masks as the offence. The banner was Masks, Media, and the MessageWho Marshals Whom?October 1, 2026What happenedAt about 7:25 a.m. on Sunday, September 27, a group of masked men dressed head to toe inblack gathered near Chief Eli Larue Way, close to the former Kamloops Indian ResidentialSchool. Police confronted them there and tracked them as they moved through the city. Hourslater, men […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5405"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5405"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5407,"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5405\/revisions\/5407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
the substance. Critics who say the men \u201cweren\u2019t doing anything wrong\u201d are right that no crime
was committed. They are not right that nothing was said.
The result is a familiar \u2018Canadian\u2019 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<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Reconciliation-start-digging.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"