The Globe and Mail published a story just over a week ago pointing out that it has been five years since the story of mass graves of children at an indigenous school in British Columbia became international news. And in all that time, no shred of evidence has turned up to support those claims.
Five years ago, Rosanne Casimir, Chief (Kúkpi7) of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, issued a 600-word press release that broke the country’s heart. The announcement said that using radar technology, her community had found the remains of 215 former residential school students, some as young as three years old…
But five years on, the country is still trying to understand what it is the First Nation found at the Tk’emlúps site, in an old apple orchard…
Recently in Tulsa, Oklahoma, archeologists used ground-penetrating radar and oral stories to pin-point what they believed was a mass grave from the city’s 1921 race massacre. When they excavated the area in 2020, they found construction debris, artifacts and dirt, but no remains.
“It demonstrated exactly why you don’t claim too much from anomalies,” said state archeologist Kary Stakelbeck in an interview. The Tulsa search has since uncovered remains in other areas.
To really appreciate this, you need to go back to the moment all of it started. The story itself was horrifying and immediately got a lot of attention in 2001. Here’s how the NY Times reported it at the time.
For decades, most Indigenous children in Canada were taken from their families and forced into boarding schools. A large number never returned home, their families given only vague explanations, or none at all.
Now an Indigenous community in British Columbia says it has found evidence of what happened to some of its missing children: a mass grave containing the remains of 215 children on the grounds of a former residential school.
Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation said on Friday that ground-penetrating radar had discovered the remains near the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, which operated from 1890 until the late 1970s.
“It’s a harsh reality and it’s our truth, it’s our history,” Chief Casimir said at a news conference. “And it’s something that we’ve always had to fight to prove. To me, it’s always been a horrible, horrible history.”
The remains, which Chief Casimir described as “many, many years old — decades,” included those of children as young as 3.
That’s the opening of the story and if you were a casual reader your takeaway would be that this definitely happened and the proof has been uncovered. How else would this Chief be able to describe the “remains” in such detail? How else would they know there were 215 children?
But if you read on, you learn that the search for these remains had been going on for a while and was really based on an attempt to confirm stories told by former students.
Chief Casimir said the search for remains at Kamloops began in the early 2000s, in part because official explanations — including suggestions that the missing children had simply run away — did not match with the stories conveyed by former students.
“There had to be more to the story,” she said. “It’s about bringing in the advanced technology today to be able to look beneath the surface of the soil and to confirm some of the stories that were once told.”
But again, the only conclusion possible after reading this story is that they had in fact confirmed it. It was no longer just a story, it was a mass grave full of kids. PM Trudeau responded to the news. He ordered that flags be flown at half staff for the next six months to show respect to the 215 victims.
The news that remains were found at the former Kamloops residential school breaks my heart – it is a painful reminder of that dark and shameful chapter of our country’s history. I am thinking about everyone affected by this distressing news. We are here for you. https://t.co/ZUfDRyAfET
— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) May 28, 2021
And the government agreed to put up millions of dollars to aid in confirming the find. As of this year, the total is just shy of $10 million. Supposedly a dig of one area is set to take place sometime next year. Why so long? That’s not entirely clear.
Meanwhile, the government hired someone to monitor the denialists.
Kimberly Murray said she sensed a broader shift away from the TRC findings and towards denialism in 2022, shortly after the federal government appointed her as special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves. In an interim report she noted that “denialists” had tried to break into the Tk’emlúps apple orchard “in the middle of the night, carrying shovels.” She urged Ottawa to implement penalties for such acts.
Ms. Murray finds the unrelenting demand for bones morbid and unnecessary.
But it looks like Murray might have to add the Globe and Mail editorial board to her list of denialists. They responded to the article by saying that journalists hadn’t been skeptical enough of the claims.
The fact of the crimes committed against Indigenous children at residential schools over many decades does not automatically validate claims that hundreds of students were dumped into unmarked graves in Kamloops and other residential schools. That is an extraordinary assertion, one that requires proof.
That should have been the starting point for the media in May, 2021, when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation first issued a press release announcing the “confirmation of the remains of 215 children of the Kamloops Indian Residential School” through the use of ground-penetrating radar that identified subterranean anomalies.
The media, including The Globe and Mail, did not initially scrutinize, much less challenge, that assertion. The initial headlines and stories in the media simply stated as fact that the remains of 215 children had been found…
The lesson of 2021 should be: assertions about residential schools should be listened to carefully, and then, just as carefully, held up to scrutiny.
Justin Trudeau isn’t PM anymore but he’s still around. He could correct his statements if he were so inclined but he hasn’t done so. Finally, it’s worth noting that the outrage created by this story seems to have had a real impact on churches in parts of Canada. All of these arsons, 33 according to this report, happened shortly after the mass graves report.
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