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They were what? Note some of the non-Catholic Churches burned down were on reservations/native land as well. So how much increased risk Catholic churches have over churches in general still isn't clear.
Back in the Freedom Fries era, we occasionally saw someone attacking a swarthy individual wearing a turban while shouting something derogatory to Arabs, and then it turned out the victim was actually Sikh. My understanding is that these cases were generally chalked up to Islamophobia, even though the victim wasn't a Muslim, because the attacker's motivation was hatred of Muslims.
This situation seems analogous. I guess it's reasonable to ask whether the hatred is toward Catholics in particular, or Christians generally, but it's pretty clearly a wave of hate crimes aimed at a coherent target. It's especially notable since there's zero evidence the inciting incident actually happened.
Sure, that's basically my point is that it may be generally anti-Christian sentiment not anti-Catholic. Not saying either of those things are good, just that, it isn't necessarily what we were talking about.
As to the inciting incident, assuming we are linking it to the residential schools, it depends what you think the inciting incident was. I'd suggest the talk of deaths is only accepted because of the already existing animus about the residential schools. Even if every attributed death was debunked perfectly, I would suggest that not much would change in the feelings about the matter.
Like if the Holocaust was successfully denied, and all the Jewish deaths were just attributed to the horrors of war and a starving populace and not actual gas chambers, would Jews have no animus against Nazis? Seems unlikely.
So I would say the inciting event definitely happened. In that some of the native populace was forced into schools. That animus is WHY they believe that the schools were murdering kids during rugby practice, not the source of it.
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